It contains some wonderfully scandalous stories from the archives of southern France, which are also likely to be the subject of my next book.

You can read the full text of my article here at French History, if you subscribe, or here in its pre-print form.

The Radio Times calls me and Joe Crowley ‘a comely duo’ (!) and describes the show’s ‘often grisly expose of torture and execution at the Tower of London’. It also has a feature on one of our stories – Josef Jakobs, the last man to be executed at the Tower of London.

The TV Times says that if you’re planning to visit the Tower of London, ’this series reveals its bloody history’ and gives the show 4 out of 5 stars.

Finally, Joe Clay at The Sunday Times (15/4/12) has chosen Bloody Tales as one of their digital choice picks.

Very pleased that three papers have chosen it as a highlight!

Airing on National Geographic Channel UK. Made by True North Productions.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=18xRocHnGxs

If you have access to NatGeoTV, I hope you’ll be watching!

‘History publishers like a gimmick, so I assumed Suzannah Lipscomb’s A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England (Ebury, £12.99) must be a cheeky rip-off of Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guide series.’

Thankfully, he continues…

‘Not so. In fact this is a rich, meticulously plotted field guide to the surviving architectural treasures of Tudor England: the houses, fortresses, palaces and battlefields that were trodden by our most famous royal dynasty, from Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle to Kett’s Oak and Burghley House (pictured).But it is more than just historical I-Spy. Lipscomb is an eloquent tour-guide, and each of her 50 destinations allows her deftly to unfold a different chapter of Tudor history.’

Read the rest of it here.

We talked about the proposed new A levels, the viewing habits of teenage murderer, Daniel Bartlam; Argentina’s president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s shoddy use of history and whether the Queen is a vampire.

My agent has kindly put a clip on YouTube (forgive the short shrift given to others…):

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp_2tbaeGyE

It begins:

‘I am frequently asked two questions: why am I a Tudor historian? And why do I think people remain fascinated by this period? The answer is the same: the Tudor era has all the best stories.

Consider: the remarkable sixteenth century contains our tabloid king – the much married Henry VIII – and our virgin queen – the unmarried Elizabeth I – and huge religious change – the overthrow, restoration and eventual displacing of the Roman Catholic church in England; centuries-old monasteries dissolved; heretics burnt and priests tortured. It is an age of threats against England – the attempted French invasion and the Spanish Armada – and of the discovery and colonisation of new worlds, the beginnings of empire and the founding of the navy. It is the age of Holbein and Shakespeare, of glorious architecture and palaces, and of some of the most extraordinary characters in British history…’

Read on.

Photos by John Cairns

‘All the King’s Fools’, the groundbreaking performances by actors with learning difficulties at Hampton Court Palace in 2011, to recreate the natural fools of Henry VIII’s court, has been shortlisted as an educational initiative by the Museums Association’s Museums + Heritage Awards for Excellence 2012:

http://www.museumsandheritage.com/awards/2012-shortlist

The other exciting news is that films of the performances are now available to watch on the project website, www.allthekingsfools.co.uk. Do have a look!

“It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I approached Suzannah Lipscomb’s latest book. Was it really necessary? Did the world need another guide book to the historic buildings of England? Would she not be forced into tiresome iterations of ‘We can imagine…’ or ‘If one closes one’s eyes one can almost hear…’ and so on.

Well, so much for my judgement: I stand corrected. A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England is not only a first-class and fascinating guide to the most important of what survives of Tudor England, it also doubles as a deceptively thorough history of the period – and indeed a fine introduction to the complexities of life in sixteenth-century England…”

Read on here.

Today, my review of Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England was published in History Today:

“Ian Mortimer has taken L.P. Hartley to heart. If ‘the past is a foreign country’, where ‘they do things differently’, Mortimer’s Time Traveller books are our historicalLonely Planets. Using the innovative approach first seen in his wildly successful The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, Mortimer has turned his attention to the first Elizabethan age (1558-1603). By using telling details to evoke the world of the past, he writes history as people want to read it.

Mortimer’s basic conceit – time travel – is a very powerful one, allowing him to do a number of things that are rare in history books. He writes in the second person and the present tense – giving the text an immediacy – and yet encompasses the whole of Elizabeth I’s reign as if we are waiting by our DeLoreans ready to enter a date…”

Read on here.

You can hear it all, and see a splendid collection of photographs from The Vyne – a real gem of a house – on the BBC History Magazine website:

http://www.historyextra.com/vyne

or go straight to the podcast here:

http://www.historyextra.com/podcast/15th-march-2012

The podcast accompanies an article that I wrote in this month’s BBC History Magazine called ‘Tudor courtiers: Where History Happened’.

I’m delighted to report that Dr Hannah Dawson will be joining us in the history faculty at New College of the Humanities. Hannah currently holds a senior lectureship at the University of Edinburgh and works on the history of ideas. She has a double first class degree in History, a MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History, and a PhD for her study of John Locke, all from the University of Cambridge.

I’m tremendously excited that Hannah is joining the team. She is a brilliant intellectual historian with a stellar pedigree, and she’s full of dynamism and verve. I know the students will love her, and we are very lucky to have her.

For the next seven days, you can catch some of them on iPlayer e.g.

BBC Northampton, chatting with Bernie Keith here: bbc.in/xCD0li – starting at 2.38.50

or

BBC Leicester, chatting with Jonathan Lampon here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002kycm – starting 49.56

(although I do appear to say ‘lucid’, as opposed to ‘lurid’ details!)

For the Telegraph’s new history page, I was invited to consider who would be my six dream dinner party guests from history.

I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about this! I tried to choose people from different historical periods, who’d have fascinating stories to tell from the past, but who’d also make good dinner companions. I wonder what you think of my final choices!

Incidentally, I love the fact that the feature is called ‘Table Talk’, after the famous collection of Luther’s candid conversations over his dinner table. And I should add: I was told that I couldn’t make the obvious choices – Jesus, Shakespeare, Nelson, Churchill,  etc. My guests had to be a bit more obscure (which was actually a wonderful challenge), but as this isn’t mentioned in an introduction, my choices probably look peculiarly arcane…

Here’s the article online:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/9134363/Dr-Suzannah-Lipscomb-My-dream-dinner-party-guests-from-history.html

Copies of my new book have arrived with me this last week, and I’ve been absolutely thrilled to see them. The book really is a thing of beauty – the cover is so gorgeously designed that – never mind the contents – I’d buy it for the cover alone!

Here it is. Artfully depicted amidst the debris of my desk.

It comes out on 15 March 2012, but you can pre-order it on Amazon.

Emily Paine from Angel Magazine interviewed me recently over a cup of tea at the British Library. We talked of cabbages and kings, but above all, about New College of the Humanities, and my new book and series. Her flattering piece can be read on p. 47 of Angel’s March 2012 issue or by clicking on the picture to the left.

I’ve just finishing filming a three-part series on the Tower of London. Made by production company True North, it will air on National Geographic in April 2012. My co-presenter was the brilliant Joe Crowley.

We explored some of the best and most fascinating stories associated with the Tower of London: from Anne Boleyn’s alleged adultery, to James Scott, Duke of Monmouth’s botched execution in 1685, and from Father John Gerard’s daring escape from the Tower in 1597, to the storming of the Tower by a huge mob of peasants in 1381. In each case we were challenging some of our basic assumptions about the Tower, and learning a lot along the way: even in areas where we thought we knew it all already!

I met a wonderful array of experts, including a former spy and a Home Office pathologist, explored the Tower’s defences, and got to look at some beautiful historical documents. I even spoke to a relative of the last person to be executed at the Tower (in 1941!) which was immensely moving. Joe learnt how to make an executioner’s axe, shot targets in a firing range, and scaled Tower 42! Clambering into priest holes, going to where Robert Catesby and the other Gunpowder Plots had their final shoot-out, and seeing the farmer’s field where German spy, Josef Jakobs, landed in Cambridgeshire, all brought home new perspectives on some familiar, and some unfamiliar, material.

Many of the nine cases we investigated fell within my area of specialism – the Tudors and Stuarts – so filming the series was a particular joy to me. Some of the documents that fascinated me most were letters from Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey (whom I’m convinced should henceforth be called Jane I) and Mary I in the crisis of July 1553. I also enjoyed reading the post-mortem report on Lady Arbella Stuart’s corpse in 1615, and several Acts of Attainder under Henry VIII, chiefly those against Thomas Cromwell and Katherine Howard.

I also read the oldest book I think I’ve ever held: a fourteenth-century account of Simon of Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury’s death by Thomas Walsingham, kept at the College of Arms. (It was great that my palaeographic skills came in so useful, but I admit that the one thing I wasn’t expecting to come away from the series with was a conviction that I must improve my Latin!)

It was also particularly amazing to be let into the Acts Room at the Houses of Parliament: every roll is an Act of Parliament passed between 1497 and 1850! I could have stayed in there for a very long time.

Joe and I researched different aspects of each story and then came back to share our perspectives, which occasionally led to some heated debates. I hope the series will be as fun and informative to watch as it was to make!

The abstract is below, and you can read it here in its published form in French History (volume 25, issue 4, December 2011, 408-426) if you are subscribed to French History or have institutional access to online scholarly journals.

There is a pre-print manuscript version of the article here: Crossing boundaries Lipscomb French History final manuscript for those who don’t have such access.

Abstract

Using evidence from cases recorded in the registers of the consistories of southern France, the author investigates the way in which Languedocian women policed each other’s behaviour, enforcing a collective morality through gossip, sexual insult and physical confrontation. In contrast to case studies by other historians, it is argued here that gossip does appear to have been a peculiarly female activity, but far more than simply being an outlet for malice or prurience, it gave women a distinctive social role in the town. No less evident is the involvement of women in physical violence both against each other and against men, violence which, though less extreme than its male counterpart, nonetheless occupies a significant role in the proceedings of the consistories.

I was lucky enough to have the acclaimed cartoonist, Adrian Teal, draw an unbidden caricature of me very recently, and as I think it’s completely brilliant, I thought I’d share it with you.

Teal on Twitter: @adeteal