Jeremy Black, who recently retired as professor of history of Exeter University, has just published the two latest installments of his series of works on writers of literary fiction. England in the Age of Dickens, 1812-70 (Amberley, 2022) is an outstanding discussion of the worlds in which the most famous "Victorian novelist" engaged - even as it questions that reputation by reminding us that Dickens was often writing about an older England. In The Importance of Being Poirot (St Augustine's Press, 2021), Black turns his attention to Agatha Christie, showing how she sustained the moral framework that drove her detective fiction even as the world changed, sometimes in fundamental ways, around her. 

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.

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