The Harlot’s Progress (BBC4) and The Georgian Underworld: A Study of Criminal Subcultures in Eighteenth-Century England by Rictor Norton

Historical fiction–speculative or otherwise–is a challenge for a number of reasons, but probably the biggest challenge is the problem of texture: how to get the texture of that alien historical world right? This is what impressed me about China Miéville’s depiction of Bas-Lag in Perdido Street Station (a book I discussed here a decade ago): […]