Clik here to view.
THE CHANGING FACE OF TENNIS – Dianne Hofmeyr
With strawberries and cream and summer here (?) and Wimbledon underway, I’m being a bit frivolous today. There was once a time when women practiced their forehand not in neon spandex, but wearing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Help! by Louisa Young
Today it is quite simple. I have nothing to say, I want only to ask. Erudite ladies, do any of you know anything about this? Other than that it is lovely, and mediaeval, and French in some way? And...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Want to know and need to know, by K. M. Grant
In the days before google maps provided answers (of a sort) to all essential pre-travel questions - how long? how far? how much? what way? - before, even, motor cars and motorways, you had to know your...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Charles Palliser interviewed by Linda Buckley-Archer
We are delighted to welcome our June guest, Charles Palliser, whose best-known book so far is The Quincunx. It is also a pleasure to welcome back Linda Buckley-Archer to the blog, who was one of our...
View ArticleJune Competition - double opportunity!
Competitions are open to UK residents onlyBecause Charles Palliser's new novel, Rustication, has been postponed till November, we are offering instead two signed copies of The Quincunx to the first...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Now we are two by Mary Hoffman
Photo by Anssi Koskinen from Turku, FinlandIt is now exactly two years since the History Girls began, on 1st July 2011! In that time we've had over half a million hits, almost twice as many from the US...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Peep into Marriage Manuals - Lucy Inglis
Recently I’ve been reading Victorian manuals on domestic happiness, aimed at women, obviously. With the storm raging at the moment over the changing nature of feminism, whether young women consider...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Game of Thrones - historical roots of fantasy by Eve Edwards
I wandered into my kitchen yesterday to find seventeen-year-old daughter watching what I thought was Game of Thrones.Jeremy Irons lookalike?'Oh, no. It's The Borgias,' she says (she is doing history A...
View ArticleClik here to view.
It Ain't Necessarily So - by Katherine Langrish
While Government education ministers moan about the history curriculum in English schools, I shake my head. There is no way, no way at all, to fit the whole of British history into two or three...
View ArticleA Historical Document - Joan Lennon
In 1964 David Hoffman was in the Appalachian Bluegrass country making a TV film about mountain music and dancing. Well, they rolled back the carpet and showed him! When I first decided to post this,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Clik here to view.
YESTERDAY....Part 1: THE INTERVIEW by Adèle Geras
YESTERDAY (first published by Walker Books in 1992) is a memoir I wrote of my days at Oxford between 1963 and 1966.This year, a whole lot of 69 and 70-year-olds will congregate at St Hilda’s College to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ghostly Hands & Dancing Vicars by Karen Maitland
One of the great joys of historical research is the stumbling upon tales you weren’t looking for. Last week, I was researching the history of Greestone Stairs in Lincoln for my next novel. Greestone is...
View ArticleJune Competition Winners
The winners of our June Competition are as follows:Copies of The Quincunx go toMarjorieLynne H.Copies of the Timequake trilogy go toRuanLindaPlease send me your land addresses to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Game of Thrones Storytelling Tips
by Caroline Lawrencesomewhere in the middle of the seriesI don't like fantasy.I find Tolkien tedious.Harry Potter was only fun for a book or two.Even books by the glorious and gracious Garth Nix (whom...
View ArticleA new mascot for an ancient city? - Michelle Lovric
Dolce and Gabbana held a Venetian costume ball at the Pisani Moretta palace last week – Dolce came as Arlecchino and Gabbana as a bullfighter (not a figure I recall from the Commedia dell’Arte,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Connected, by Laurie Graham
Novel-writing can lead a girl down strange research paths and this week I ended up in the Russian Museum of Telephone History - though only as an online browser, you understand. How commonplace, I’d...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Making of a Monarch, by H.M. Castor
The "Cradle of Henry V" Photograph William Edward Gray, 1912 [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsWith the firstborn child of Prince William and Kate Middleton (as was) due to arrive any day now, I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Celia Fiennes and The Ayahs Home, a very short history walk. Catherine Johnsona
I started off thinking I would write about Celia Fiennes. She was a late 17th century intrepid English woman who never married and rode around Spa towns for her health - alone. Of course she was not...
View Article