His-story told through fiction

Lucy Pughe-Morgan writes about historical fiction and why it’s so popular

HISTORICAL fiction can be a powerful tool for exposing people or perspectives that have been kept quiet by the minimal coverage in nonfiction historical material. Stories distant enough from the modern day allow for narratives free from causing upheaval from the accuracy police, striving for emotional over historical accuracy. The stereotype around historical novels being quite literally stuck in the dark ages is put to bed by the rich narratives of royal scandals in the book series by Philippa Gregory. The saviour of my lockdown boredom was reading her six-part series exposing the scandalous lives of the original womaniser himself, Henry VIII, and his succession of wives, blending rumours and facts to create a somewhat historically accurate representation of life under Tudor rule. The Other Boleyn Girl delves into the lives of the two Boleyn sisters involved with the King. The revival of this narrative through sex, scandals and secrets rippling through the court makes for a gripping and insightful read on the dynamics of the two women that brings the 1500s to life. The Plantagenet years have also been famously covered by Gregory writing a series based on the women integral to the period. your history teacher would be proud of. Who knew a history degree would be so much easier if you spent the majority of your time with your head in a novel? This is your sign to head to the fiction section.

Queen who secretly marries the newly crowned King. She fights for her family to be central to the royal court, resulting in the infamous story of the two princes in the Tower of London — pushy mum alert. The Kingmaker’s Daughter, another Gregory masterpiece, brought the story of Anne Neville to the bookshelves of Waterstones. The relatively unknown powerhouse of a woman escapes her fate by marrying Richard III in a tale that makes you love and defend the man who is widely suspected to be the killer of the princes in the tower.

The deadly Wars of the Roses are brought to life by revealing the intimate story of Elizabeth Woodville in The White

Leo Tolstoy also famously sparks life into an often dry period of history with War and Peace . Famous for its doorstop size, once you conquer the daunting 1,400 plus pages you discover gripping narrative whilst also subconsciously absorbing a lot of historical facts about the Napoleonic wars that

The new absurd

Joshua Smith, Arts and Lit Editor, explores the reality-questioning nature of contemporary art

WHAT is reality?” screeches Kate Hudson in murder mystery film

Glass Onion (2022). That seems to be the question of the decade, what with a global pandemic and other catastrophes upending normality and ever-expanding digital worlds encroaching on reality. Whether it occurred to you while doom scrolling, Googling ‘NFT’, or consuming uncanny valley-inducing AI content, some degree of reality-questioning is part of what it means to be human in the 2020s. Overwhelmed, we often turn to art, and in turn, art responds to the present, poking fun at the new absurd.

While Don’t Look Up (2021) caricatures the media cycle and politics in its criticism of climate change deniers, the aforementioned Glass Onion shatters layers of privilege to mock the central idiocy of 2020. But no film encapsulates and exaggerates the absurdity of the present as poignantly and hilariously as the genre-defying Everything Everywhere

All At Once (2022). Reality ruptures for Chinese American immigrant mother Evelyn Quan when her husband tells her that she is the only one that can stop a great evil from destroying the multiverse. It gets weird fast. Think fanny pack fight choreography, black hole bagel, hot dog fingers, etc., absurdity that elicits shocked laughter and lightens up heavy themes like nihilism and generational trauma. The wacky hodgepodge works, because at the end of the day, Everything is about a woman engaging and even embracing absurdity, choosing compassion, her life and loved ones in the face of, well, everything. In its quintessential montage, successive match cuts flash through the various versions of Evelyn, the opera singer, martial arts master, an animated Evelyn and even a meta green screen shot with the editors working over Zoom on the side. The breath-taking scene leaves you feeling infinitesimally small but still at the center of your own universe, like standing in one of Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms. Whether or not you consider film to be immersive, the rise of immersive art experiences speaks to novelty-chasing a more allencompassing escapism. Most immersive artworks succeed in suspending reality, but few satirise it on the scale of OmegaMart, an interactive installation in Las Vegas’s Area 15 that opened in 2021.

Based on the premise of a supermarket

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with interdimensional portals, OmegaMart puts consumer culture through a cosmic kaleidoscope. The installation boasts incredible detail, from witty products like Ego Echo glass cleaner and cans of Inspiration (May Also Contain Perspiration) to the soda fridge passageway leading to otherworldly installations. Beside the portal exit, a sign displays portal sickness symptoms, some nonsensical, like doppelgänger duals, and some strangely resonant, like a desire to experience déjà vu and timeline displacement. A vibrant Trojan Horse, this interactive, visual feast masks a darker undercurrent of capitalist horror that can be explored Choose Your Own Adventure style. In response to our existential questioning, art answers; yes, the endless influx of information can feel like everything from everywhere being thrown at us all at once, but if humour prefaces recentring and reconfiguring agency, let’s go down laughing.

Joshua Smith, Arts and Lit editor, writes about Émilie du Châtelet, heroine of the Enlightenment

UNFAIRLY known, if at all, as the lover of Voltaire, Émilie du Châtelet was one of the most vibrant and wittiest minds of the Enlightenment, with work spanning from ground-breaking scientific discoveries to a translation of Newton’s Principia into French. Always paired in history’s conscience with Voltaire and Newton, only recently, with modern waves of revisionist history, has she had her unique singularity recognised. Voltaire called her a “great and powerful genius”, while “she dictated and I wrote”, he tells a friend, as they co-authored Elements of Newton’s Philosophy, a work which turned the tide of French scientific tradition away from the spectre of Descartes and towards Newton, but only Voltaire’s name appeared on the frontispiece. But let’s not go on for ages about how much of a man’s world she lived in, let’s talk about her work and how revolutionary she was. Her translation of Newton, and also Leibniz, was accompanied and supplemented by annotations, revisions, and her own theories, providing a guiding, educational hand to the crusty French nobility towards an understanding of the new science of the era.

This was arguably as important to the shift in Enlightenment science as her own original theories. Yet, before her Newtonian adventures, she had been at the cross-sections of Cartesian, Leibnizian, and Newtonian systems. This led to her preparing the manuscript for Foundations of Physics, the great culmination of her intellectual difference from Voltaire, who, despite celebrating her, differed on the premise that good science needed a metaphysical foundation. With this, du Châtelet helped to forge a new version of Newtonian physics that resolved the challenges of describing force and movement, and established herself as a heroine of not just the Enlightenment, but the development of human knowledge.