About Helen Castor
What are The H Files?
I write history books — and every time I write a book, so much gets left behind.
There are good reasons for that. I’m telling a story, and that means making choices: every paragraph, every sentence has to move the story forward, to say something about its protagonists, to build the world in which they live.
But there are so many other stories I could tell along the way. People whose lives play out in the margins; moments that would look different through another pair of eyes; sources containing wonders I have to pass over; thoughts and questions scrawled in piled-up notebooks.