Jessie Childs

2 months ago | lrb.co.uk | Simon Parkin |Jessie Childs

At a canteen​ in Leningrad in December 1941, a man queued for two hours, handed over his ration card, received a bowl of soup and a bowl of porridge, ate the soup and died. A crowd formed around him, not out of concern but in the hope of acquiring extra food. Leningrad under siege was a pitiless place. 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.

Jul 5, 2024 | thetimes.com | Jessie Childs

Imagine George Smiley in a ruff and you have Robert Cecil. Spymaster to Elizabeth I and her Scottish successor, James, he was a small man, stolid, watchful, incredibly hard-working and possessed of an unnerving ability to make windows into men’s souls. He foiled every plot against the state, vowing to “kill those monsters in their cradles or else tract them out where no man else can discern the point of their footing”.

Sep 27, 2023 | quercusbooks.co.uk | James Holland |Dan Jones |Jessie Childs |Peter Taylor

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Jun 16, 2023 | thetimes.co.uk | Jessie Childs

Helena Scheuberin was a confident woman in the prime of her life in 1480s Innsbruck when Heinrich Kramer came to town. He was a church official looking for witches, but Helena refused to be cowed. She called him a “lousy monk” and said she hoped he’d catch the falling sickness. This made her a target. A spurned lover was unearthed and the brother of another rejected suitor who had died soon after dining with her. A hearing followed under papal authority.

Mar 22, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | Jessie Childs |Malcolm Gaskill

In the​ cold autumn of 1643 Susan Rodway wrote to ‘my king love’, her husband Robert. A candlemaker by trade, he was away fighting for Parliament and she hadn’t heard much from him, unlike her neighbours in the London parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West who all had news from their husbands. Their daughter, Hester, was just a baby and their young son, Willie, was sick. She was alone and scared.