Christina Croft

If ever you worry about children today, spare a thought for the people of 19th century Britain, when knife-crime was rife and gangs of children roamed the streets and countryside, committing countless horrendous crimes including murder....

At the age of 19, Queen Victoria's granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth of Hesse, stepped into the glittering court of the Romanovs, beginning a journey that would lead her from the shimmering ballrooms of St. Petersburg to the back streets of Moscow. Through intrigues, assassination, war and...

Which Victorian murderess inspired Thomas Hardy’s "Tess of the D’Urbevilles"? Who lived to regret her "deathbed" confession? Was Amelia Dyer mad or wicked? Why did the judiciary look compassionately on women who committed infanticide? Among over 80 women whose stories appear in this book...

Throughout her lonely and isolated childhood, with only her dogs and dolls for company, Queen Victoria relished the visits of her cousins, many of whom she came to regard as surrogate brothers and sisters....

Spring 1917 - the war has been raging for over two and a half years, and neither the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey) nor the Entente (Britain, France, Russia, and Italy) are any closer to a decisive victory. In Russia, the Revolution and enforced abdication of the Tsar has...

On 28th June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie Chotek, were shot dead in broad daylight on a crowded street in Sarajevo....

On 6 July 1868, when told of the birth of her seventh granddaughter, Queen Victoria remarked that the news was "a very uninteresting thing for it seems to me to go on like the rabbits in Windsor Park". Her apathy was understandable - this was her 14th grandchild, and, though she had given birth...

Almost a century after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, Kaiser Wilhelm II is still viewed as either a warmonger or a madman, as the hundred-year-old propaganda posters remain fixed in the general consciousness. Was he, though, truly responsible for the catastrophe of the First World War...

In the summer of 1914, the capitals of Europe erupt in a patriotic frenzy as peoples on all sides, roused by the press, rejoice at the outbreak of the "war to end wars". The rejoicing soon turns to disillusionment....

Born into eight very different families, the upbringing and fortunes of Queen Victoria's grandsons varied widely. Some died in childhood, some were killed in action, and others lived to see grandchildren of their own.