The identity of Robin Hood is one of the great historical mysteries of English history - until now. Everyone has heard of Robin Hood, the brilliant archer who 'robbed the rich to give to the poor' and who always triumphed over the forces of evil, but the man behind the legend is as mysterious as King Arthur. There were outlaws who lived in the royal forests preying on unwary travelers, and Robin Hoods whose names are recorded in historical documents: but no one has been able to prove that one of these real Robins was the individual whose exploits were commemorated in ballad and song. David...

Not many people would claim to be saints, or alternatively, consider themselves entirely without redeeming qualities. Some are unquestionably worse than others, but few have been held in greater infamy than Richard Plantagenet, afterwards Duke of Gloucester and, later still, King Richard III. Richard's character has been besmirched as often as it has been defended, and the arguments between his detractors and supporters still rage after several centuries. Was he a ruthless hunchback who butchered his way to the throne, a paragon of virtue who became a victim of Tudor propaganda, or (as seems...

On December 27, 1550 an old man named Richard Plantagenet was buried at Eastwell in Kent. He had spent much of his life working as a bricklayer, but, unusually for a bricklayer, he could read Latin. He eventually told his employer that he was a natural son of Richard III. Yet, if this was true, why was he not publicly acknowledged by the king? The fact that he was called Richard Plantagenet is also revealing. Had he simply been Richard III's bastard, he would have been styled "of Gloucester" or given the name of his birthplace. And where is the evidence that Prince Richard actually died?

The Battle of Stoke, the last and most neglected armed clash of the Wars of the Roses, is one of history's great might-have-beens. The engagement was fought on Saturday 16 June 1487 in fields just south of Newark in Nottinghamshire when the forces of the first Tudor king Henry VII confronted the Yorkist army of the pretender Lambert Simnel and his commander the Earl of Lincoln. Less than two years after Richard III's defeat at Bosworth, the fate of England again hung in the balance. But Henry's victory over the rebels was decisive - it confirmed the crown to the House of Tudor for more than a...

Nationally renowned journalist Peter Owen is understandably bewildered when he receives two letters from his recently deceased wife Gwen a few weeks after her funeral. In the second letter she asks him to expose Matthias Kronau, an eminent German university lecturer and her lover from twenty years earlier, as a clandestine pornographic film maker and academic charlatan. When a cautiously optimistic Peter travels to Germany to meet the suave, charismatic, self-styled occultist and womaniser Matthias, why do his attempts to carry out her mysterious request lead to lifechanging outcomes for...