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Vikings - Lucy Inglis
I began writing about history as a student of Anglo-Saxon. Our tutor was registered blind, so five of us sat around each week and discussed sea spray and the feel of heather, and leather tunics, and...
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Old Sport and That Hat: The Great Gatsby - Eve Edwards
Have you seen the Baz Luhrmann version of The Great Gatsby? I went last week with some trepidation as the critics had been cool and found I enjoyed it more than I expected. I had spent some of last...
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Riddles and Oracular speech - Katherine Langrish
You remember of course the riddle scene in ‘The Hobbit’, in which Bilbo Baggins pits his wits against hungry Gollum on the edge of the dark lake at the roots of the Misty Mountains? And how, after...
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Travelling Manners - The More Things Change ... Joan Lennon
The Bayswater Omnibus by George William Joy 1895(from the blog It's About Time)On 30 January 1836, The Times published "The Omnibus Law" - obviously the paper felt there was a need for guidelines...
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The Suffragette Who Died To Be Heard - Katherine Roberts
100 years ago today, suffragette Emily Davison lay unconscious in hospital after stepping in front of King George V’s horse while it ran in the Derby on June 4th, bringing down horse and jockey and...
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IN ZODIAC LIGHT by Robert Edric....a review by Adèle Geras
IN ZODIAC LIGHT tells the story of Ivor Gurney, while he was a patient at the City of London Mental Hospital in Dartford. That's not the only story it tells, however. Robert Edric plaits the narrative...
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Bad Eggs by Karen Maitland
I was in Diss in Norfolk recently and came across a monument with this intriguing inscription.‘Matilda, Daughter of Robert Fitzwalter, The Valiant, Lord of the manor of Diss rejected the advances of...
View ArticleCompetition winners May
The winners of copies of Mary Hooper's the Disgrace of Kitty Grey are as follows:WonderlibrarianCPD23Blog (Sue)Ruan PeetCharmedLassieMarjorieFrancesca ScanlanMary chose the winners herself and found it...
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Pearls of Antiquity
Coleman Douglas Pearlsby Caroline LawrenceLast Thursday I attended a small exhibit of portraits by my friend Lorna Lawson-Cruttenden. The paintings were on show at an unusual venue, a jewellery shop...
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Blue glass seahorses, hair sandwiches and veiled statues - Michelle Lovric
In 1902, the English folklore specialist Edward Lovett went to Venice. He wrote, ‘"I found itinerant hawkers of curios selling the hippocampus, tied in bundles of three with red worsted. These were...
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Purple Prose, by Laurie Graham
Recently I’ve noticed an increase in the number of women of a certain age wearing purple. Is it the influence of Jenny Joseph’s treasurable poem Warning? Or are more women waking up to the fact that...
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Misplaced Medieval Treasures, by H.M. Castor
Bristol's medieval High Cross at StourheadPhotograph by Chris Downer [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsJust over a week ago, I went looking for a...
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FEISTY WOMEN IN HISTORY by Theresa Breslin
Why is it that highly intelligent, accomplished, able women are viewed with suspicion by men (and other women) and get such a bad press? ISABELLA of Spain – researched when writing Prisoner of the...
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'Keeping History Fresh' by A L Berridge
It sounds horrible to ‘keep history fresh’, as if it were a loaf of stale bread. To me it's particularly repulsive since learning that ‘50 years’ is the magic age for the Historical Novel Society -...
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Halcyon Days - by Imogen Robertson
I am today in an exceptionally good mood, not in itself a revelation worthy of a blog post perhaps, but the reason I’m in such fine form is bound up with being a writer so I’m going to share it anyway....
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THE GLASS BEAD (GUESSING) GAME, by Jane Borodale
I think it’s partly the mystery, the unknoweableness of the past that makes it so compelling - isn't it? And why is it that some objects from the past can seem so much more peculiarly intense than...
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The Queen of the Castle, by Leslie Wilson
When I was a kid, we used to play out; we were free to roam the way the children are in the Nesbit stories, or in Swallows and Amazons, or - diving down the social scale - like the Family from One End...
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WHEN I GROW UP: The authors that inspired my journey to publication by...
I was fifteen years old when I decided that I wanted to write historical fiction for a career. I had always told myself stories out loud but until my teens had never written any of them down, and none...
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THE HOSEPIPE AND THE BUCKET OF FROGS by Eleanor Updale
How do you See the past? I don't mean the wigs and the crinolines. I'm talking about whether there's a place in your head where you visualise passage of time.I got to talking about this with a friend...
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