If you are interested in the history behind The Whalebone Theatre, listed below are some of the books that inspired it. You can also read more about a selection of them in this piece by Joanna on Bookshop.org.
Peacetime England:
The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War by Juliet Nicolson
Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 by Virginia Nicholson
We Danced All Night: Britain Between the Wars by Martin Pugh
The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West
Augustus John: The New Biography by Michael Holroyd
Wartime England:
London At War 1939- 1945 by Philip Ziegler
Forgotten Voices of the Secret War by Roderick Bailey
A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE by Sarah Helm
Between Silk and Cyanide: A Code Maker's War by Leo Marks
Beaulieu the Finishing School for Secret Agents by Cyril Cunningham
A House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair
Land Girls: Women's Voices from the Wartime Farm by Joan Mant
Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War by Linda Hervieux
Love, Sex and War: Changing Values 1939-45 by John Costello
The 1944 production of Anouilh's Antigone in Occupied Paris
Wartime France:
When Paris Went Dark by Ronald C Rosbottom
Les Parisiennes by Anne Sebba
And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-occupied Paris by Alan Riding
Moondrop to Gascony by Anne-Marie Walters
Mission Improbable by Beryl Escott
Code Name Pauline by Pearl Witherington and Kathryn Atwood
Maman, What Are We Called Now? by Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar
Eleven Days in August: The Liberation of Paris in 1944 by Matthew Cobb
Antigone by Jean Anouilh (1946 translation by Lewis Galantière and 2009 translation by Barbara Bray)
GA Henty stories at Bridport Old Books, Dorset
Country Houses:
Not in Front of the Servants: A True Portrait of Upstairs, Downstairs Life by Frank Victor Dawes
A Kingston Lacy Childhood by Viola Banks
The Gentry: Stories of the English by Adam Nicolson
The Housekeeper's Tale: The Women Who Really Ran the English Country House by Tessa Boase
Our Uninvited Guests: The Secret Life of Britain's Country Houses 1939-45 by Julie Summers
Dorset:
Dorset at War by Rodney Legg
Dorchester Versus Hitler by Colin Churchill
A Flirt's Eye View of Weymouth's War by Dawn Gould
Tyneham: A Lost Heritage by Lilian Bond
The Village that Died for England: The Strange Story of Tyneham by Patrick Wright
Childhood Reading:
Moonfleet by J Meade Falkner
The Tempest by William Shakespeare, illustrated by Arthur Rackham
Adventure stories by GA Henty, much beloved by Jasper and Cristabel, can be read on Project Gutenberg.
The Iliad that the Seagrave children read is the Alexander Pope version from 1899, which is also available on Project Gutenberg. 'Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring/ Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!'
Arthur Rackham illustration for 1926 edition of The Tempest