Welcome to The Broken Compass

History, books & wonder

I’m Mathew Lyons and The Broken Compass is my new Substack. It will feature essays and book reviews, thoughts and reflections on my current research and reading, and, I hope, interviews with other historians and authors – not to mention links to my writing elsewhere.

I have borrowed the name of this - lifted it, if you prefer - from the great Ben Jonson. It was his impresa - that is, a personal emblem – which he accompanied with the Latin motto deest quod duceret orbem, which Jonson’s most recent biographer Ian Donaldson translates as something like ‘that which might guide the world is missing’. To me, though, it represents an idea of exploration without direction: I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I hope to find and share much of interest and enjoyment along the way.

I write the Months Past column for History Today and contribute to a wide range of publications, most recently The Spectator, Slightly Foxed, Engelsberg Ideas and New Humanist. Other titles I have written for include the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, The Times, The Quietus, The Economist, The Critic, All About History and The Chap. My poems have been published by Bad Lilies, The Interpreter’s House, Under the Radar, and Reliquiae among others.

I have an MA in Renaissance Literature and am also a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. My current website is here.

I am also the author of The Favourite, the first book-length exploration of the love affair between Walter Ralegh and Elizabeth I. Helen Castor, author of She-Wolves, chose it as one of her books of the year. She said: ‘The Favourite is wonderful. Elegant and intriguing – a seductive portrait of a fascinating relationship. I couldn’t put it down.’

My other books are Impossible Journeys, a collection of travellers’ tales about journeys to places that do not exist, which was compared by The Guardian to a ‘non-fiction Calvino’, and There and Back Again: In the Footsteps of JRR Tolkien, described by Professor Tom Shippey as ‘an excellent guide not only to Tolkien’s actual real-life physical environment, but also to his deepest feelings about England, about landscape, about history and prehistory’.