Jessie Childs
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jessiechilds.bsky.social
Jessie Childs
@jessiechilds.bsky.social
Writer. Historian. Books:
The Siege of Loyalty House
God’s Traitors
Henry VIII’s Last Victim
Reviews for the Times and LRB
jessiechilds.co.uk
IG @jessiechildshistorian
WHO’S THE BEST HENRY VIII?

V funchat with @sixteenthcgirl.bsky.social @alexvont.bsky.social & @drjoannepaul.bsky.social

Watch on History Hit TV or listen here👇

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/n...
October 10, 2025 at 1:37 PM
Reposted by Jessie Childs
July 19, 2025 at 4:13 PM
Reposted by Jessie Childs
It’s publication day for Thomas More: A Life and Death in Tudor England with Michael Joseph @penguinrandomhouse.bsky.social!

Pop by your local bookshop or order now - uk.bookshop.org/a/12264/9781...
May 29, 2025 at 9:14 AM
VE Day from Hammersmith!

Celebrating peace, freedom and civilisation.

Stay frosty ✌️

#VEDAY80
May 8, 2025 at 1:32 PM
Iain Pears’s latest book is non-fiction and I loved it. My review is in today’s Sunday Times @thetimes.com

www.thetimes.com/article/00d6...
The moving story of a Cambridge don and his Soviet lover
In Parallel Lives Iain Pears unearths the unlikely romance between Francis Haskell and Larissa Salmina, two art historians from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain
www.thetimes.com
April 27, 2025 at 10:53 AM
‘Auschwitz did not fall from the sky. It comes step by step. Evil comes step by step.’

Auschwitz Survivor Marian Turski who died 3 months after being interviewed by Simon Schama for this chilling, deeply affecting, utterly essential film.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
BBC Two - Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz
Simon Schama confronts the Holocaust as a Europe-wide crime of complicity.
www.bbc.co.uk
April 27, 2025 at 10:15 AM
Reposted by Jessie Childs
Meta needs to PAY authors for what it has already STOLEN
April 3, 2025 at 9:15 AM
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This happened yesterday - the launch of #StoryofaMurder with some of my favourite authors and historians (and the group hug after the photo). #SuzannahLipscomb #sarahchurchwell #davidolusoga #bettanyhughes #jessiechilds #alexvontunzelmann #matthewparker #LindseyFitzharris
March 25, 2025 at 7:34 PM
Loving the spring blossom, but looking forward to
The Blood in Winter!

Congrats @jonathanhealey.bsky.social - looks like another corker
March 24, 2025 at 12:46 PM
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📅 #OnThisDay (March 24, 1603): Elizabeth I's illustrious reign concludes with her passing. 🌟 @jessiechilds.bsky.social challenges the notion of Elizabeth's tolerance in our Series 7 episode.

Listen now at: pod.fo/e/18aeb8
<a href
="/hashtag/ElizabethI" class="hover:underline text-blue-600 dark:text-sky-400 no-card-link">#ElizabethI #Tudor #otd #onthisdate #history #podcast
March 24, 2025 at 11:30 AM
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Dynamite review of #StoryofaMurder in today’s Sunday Times!
March 23, 2025 at 11:17 AM
So well deserved! I’ve just heard the first two eps and they are BRILLIANT!!
Bravo @sarahchurchwell.bsky.social and @davidolusoga.bsky.social
I can’t wait to hear more 🥳
In less depressing news, I’d like to thank everyone who has been listening and sending lovely feedback to me & the brilliant @davidolusoga.bsky.social on our new podcast @throughtimepod.bsky.social. Thanks to you we hit No. 1 within a day of launching! We’re thrilled with the response. Thank you! 🥳
March 23, 2025 at 3:05 PM
Reposted by Jessie Childs
Looking for a new history podcast? Look no further! @davidolusoga.bsky.social and @sarahchurchwell.bsky.social join forces to shine light on obscure stories from the past in JOURNEY THROUGH TIME. First up is an explosive tale about a terror attack that damaged the Statue of Liberty in 1916 👇
"There’s something almost naive about the America of 1916..”🇺🇸

Watch or listen to the first ever episode of Journey Through Time now! 👇

🎙️https://linktr.ee/journeythroughtime
📺https://youtu.be/JBPQ-Hb2THQ
March 20, 2025 at 4:16 PM
Reposted by Jessie Childs
New on the writer’s bookshelf: eight questions about writers, books, and reading with the brilliant @jessiechilds.bsky.social
open.substack.com/pub/mathewly...
The writer's bookshelf: Jessie Childs
Eight questions about writers, books, and reading…
open.substack.com
March 10, 2025 at 8:42 AM
I love this - a detail from Alison Watt's extraordinary triptych of paintings based on Oliver Cromwell's death mask.

Oil on canvas.
Incredibly lifelike, even in death.

It's part of Watt's wonderful new exhibition, From Light, which opens at Pitzhanger Manor today.
March 5, 2025 at 8:15 AM
‘If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.’
The best short piece I've read on Trump's new Predator America- Brilliant and crucially important @FT editorial

America has turned on its friends - on.ft.com/3ERSO6o via @FT
February 24, 2025 at 9:13 AM
No lovelier place of a winter’s evening than John Sandoe Books 🧡

Pic taken last night at the launch of Edward Wilson-Lee’s wonderful new book, The Grammar of Angels.
February 11, 2025 at 7:58 AM
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‘Two in five people succumbed in the first winter and the streets were littered with corpses. Most citizens trudged past them without a backwards glance. All that mattered was the next meal.’

@jessiechilds.bsky.social on the siege of Leningrad: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Jessie Childs · Resident Bean Expert: Leningrad under Siege
Five thousand Leningraders died of distrofia on Christmas Day 1941. One of them was Aleksandr Shchukin, a 58-year-old...
www.lrb.co.uk
February 8, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Reposted by Jessie Childs
‘State broadcasts told of “hardship” and “shortage” – not “starvation” and never “famine”, a word that had been criminalised a decade earlier when the government’s collectivisation policy killed millions.’

@jessiechilds.bsky.social on the siege of Leningrad: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Jessie Childs · Resident Bean Expert: Leningrad under Siege
Five thousand Leningraders died of distrofia on Christmas Day 1941. One of them was Aleksandr Shchukin, a 58-year-old...
www.lrb.co.uk
February 4, 2025 at 5:10 PM
Reposted by Jessie Childs
There are now more than fifty LRB writers on Bluesky - including @torilmoi.bsky.social, @jessiechilds.bsky.social, @sophiagoodfriend.bsky.social and @bekadiski.bsky.social with writing in our new issue and on the blog this week.

Read and follow them here:
go.bsky.app/5CZWQgk
January 31, 2025 at 5:11 PM
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‘The man in charge of the city enjoyed butter on his bread and lashings of caviar while those in his care ate their pets, sometimes their neighbours, and fashioned tagliatelle out of slow-boiled strips of leather.’

@jessiechilds.bsky.social on the siege of Leningrad: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Jessie Childs · Resident Bean Expert: Leningrad under Siege
Five thousand Leningraders died of distrofia on Christmas Day 1941. One of them was Aleksandr Shchukin, a 58-year-old...
www.lrb.co.uk
January 30, 2025 at 9:10 PM
Reposted by Jessie Childs
BDSM, angels, the inquisition, the Chaldean tongue, Savonarola – my review of Edward Wilson-Lee's fizzing book about Pico della Mirandola's thought, for The Sunday Times. www.thetimes.com/culture/book...
The Grammar of Angels by Edward Wilson-Lee review — Italy’s pop star philosopher
The life of Renaissance thinker Giovanni Pico della Mirandola quivers with intellectual fizz and sadomasochistic energy
www.thetimes.com
January 27, 2025 at 1:23 PM
An incredibly powerful archive with warnings for today.
www.whlcollections.org/testifying/
January 27, 2025 at 10:26 AM
This is an extraordinary and original book by a brilliant writer and thinker - the perfect tonic to an AI world!
Out next week
January 23, 2025 at 10:24 AM
Reposted by Jessie Childs
Once more with feeling and a dollop of frustration … Taking our work without permission or payment is theft.

thttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/14/british-novelists-criticise-government-over-ai-theft#img-1
British novelists criticise government over AI ‘theft’
Richard Osman and Kate Mosse say plan to mine artistic works for data would destroy creative fields
www.theguardian.com
January 16, 2025 at 7:39 AM