Essex Dogs Rrrraarr!

During my stint at the Oxford Literary Festival 2026, I chaired 17 events, which nearly killed me. No, it was fun… but since many of the events involved two authors, the total list of books to read was 26 – I’m not counting Richard Holmes as I had already read (and reviewed) his amazing The Boundless Deep, on Tennyson, and anyway he couldn’t make it. Another festival no-show was Francis Spufford, trapped in the West Country due to train problems, to the chagrin of his many fans. I enjoyed Nonesuch but with so much else to read I could have done without a whopping tome which ends with the ominous words ‘To Be Continued’. Seriously, it is brilliant, and conceived on such a massive scale that at 500 pages he’s only getting started.

Another star who did make it was Swiss author Nelio Biedermann, still only in his early 20s, who has written the majestic 20th-century-spanning Lázár, inspired by the world events that battered and broke his Hungarian forebears. It’s a crazy tale of dispossesion, exile, madness, sexual frenzy, violence and angst, all the more remarkable for being told in such a restrained, elevated tone. And it’s his SECOND novel! (The first is due to be translated from German.) Like all geniuses he doesn’t see there’s anything unusual about his talents. His English is fluent – I was particularly impressed by his idiomatic response to my question about whether he misses the company of his characters now the novel is finished. ‘They don’t live rent-free in my head,’ he laughed.

I also questioned whether he knew his excellent translator, Jamie Bulloch, had sneaked in an echo to the final paragraph of James Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’. No, the reference is there in the original, he said. At this point my mind was blown.

It is always a pleasure to interview Dan Jones – a couple of years ago it was for his debut historical fiction, Essex Dogs, when we discussed his move from historian to novelist in a marquee on Exeter College lawn. The debut considered the Hundred Years War from the ground up, the perspective not of kings and lords, but ordinary footsoldiers – the group of the title whom we follow initially from the battle of Crécy, through the siege of Calais in book two.

These are brilliant stories, full of frighteningly vibrant characters, events both horrific and heroic, with blood and guts galore. With book three, Lion Hearts, he’s reached a new peak in his powers. The Dogs (what remains of them) are quieter, ageing, slowing down. Even the rampaging Earl of Northampton (my favourite character) is feeling the strain. Loveday, the Dogs’ unacknowledged leader is semi-retired and running a pub in Winchelsea with a quasi-wife and son, but unknowingly he has merely relocated to the site of another hotspot, this time naval rather than military.

From being little better than football hooligans, the Dogs are starting to affect events rather than just be buffetted about by them. Jones has ingeniously taken lesser-known episodes of the conflict and given his Dogs real agency. Obviously he can’t change historical fact, but has the skill to express that this wasn’t history for the characters – it was contemporary life, subject to contingency and change. The Order of the Garter had just been inaugurated, and I liked the sense that the Dogs, like the Garter knights, are endlessly refillable. New character Rigby, replacing Romford as the youngest Dog, is bonkers and unpredictable even by their standards. The latter, meanwhile, discovers just how slippery and inconstant kings and ladies can be; true chivalry is better upheld by those at the bottom of the social pile.

Pared with Dan was debut novelist Jo Harkin, whose book The Pretender moves 100 years on to bring to vivid life the figure of Lambert Simnel, supposed son of the Duke of Clarence (Richard III’s brother) brought up in secrecy and revealed as a pawn in a plot to unseat the usurper Henry Tudor. The storytelling is so fresh that you think, hang on, could he have been the real son of…?

A bit cheeky but I asked Dan who he thought did kill the Princes in the Tower. ‘Never ask a historian that!’ he barked in mock anger (at least I think it was mock). But then answered brilliantly, of course.

And not to forget cats – I searched for days for Exeter College’s resident rodent-hunter, Walter de Staplecat. I spotted him through a window, racing across the Rector’s garden and finally ran him to ground one night in the quad. He let me get this close, before streaking off again into the night. The elusive legend lives on.