Lisa Hopkins

I first encountered Dorothy Dunnett in the mid 1980s when I was sent eight historical novels to review for a historical society newsletter. The first six were terrible; the last two were Niccolò Rising and The Spring of the Ram. I got very impatient waiting for the rest of the Nicholas books to come out but was consoled by discovering Lymond, not least because some of the places he goes to have personal resonances for me: I was born in Carlisle (where my mother and aunt still live) and have Reiver ancestry, I lived in Malta for two years as a child, and for the past thirty years I have been in Sheffield, where Mary, Queen of Scots spent a lot of time in captivity. I also used to co-organise the annual Othello’s Island conference in Nicosia (now sadly lapsed since Covid), which let me visit many of the places in Race of Scorpions, and I dragged my son and husband to Orkney after reading King Hereafter, stopping on the way to visit my old history teacher in Edinburgh, who knew Dorothy Dunnett and went on trips to Bruges with her.

Having recently retired as a professor of English I now have time to reread all the books, and also sometimes to write about them: although I am officially a Shakespearean I turned to crime with a book called Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction which has a section on Johnson Johnson, and I’ve also written about King Hereafter as a Shakespearean adaptation.

Since retiring I’ve joined the British Museum Friends Advisory Council, which involves chairing lectures and being consulted about plans and exhibitions, and I still see any Shakespeare production I can get to.

When not reading Dunnett I like Georgette Heyer, Jane Austen, and Golden Age detective fiction.