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A History of Violence, by Y S Lee
A couple of months ago at the launch party for Rivals in the City, I read aloud a scene that takes place outside Newgate Prison. The year is 1860. A wooden scaffold has been built outside the prison...
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Welcoming the May in Oxford - Katherine Langrish
So on the First of May we got up in the grey twilight at 4.45am and drove into Oxford to listen to the choirboys singing the May in from the top of Magdalen Tower. The sky was crimson, every moment...
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Still Life - Joan Lennon
BBC 4 documentaries - I love them. Even the ones where the voice-over narrator repeats what the expert has just finished saying, only less well. Even the ones where they get the background music...
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Ways of Seeing (The Paris Commune) by Lydia Syson
I spent a lot of time thinking about point of view when I was writing Liberty’s Fire. So many of my sources saw Paris as a stage, a spectacle, a panorama, and I kept trying to find a way to convey...
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Beaux on the Stage
by Marie-Louise JensenI've always been fascinated by the phenomenon of men sitting on the stage during performances and disrupting the play, and read more about it when I researched my short story, A...
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The Sheriff Rides Out: by Sue Purkiss
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a service in this tiny church in the Kent countryside. It's called St Botolph's, and it's in the grounds of Lullingstone Castle. It was a vile day with strong winds,...
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OCEANS AWAY AND OAKUM by Penny Dolan
The story I’m working on needs a character removed for a good while. Death is not possible, as I need an eventual re-union. So I introduced a nasty planting of stolen goods, and that was that. She was...
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Fashion On The Ration - Celia Rees
I recently visited the Fashion On The Ration Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum with my daughter, Catrin. We both have an interest in 1940's fashion and the exhibition did not disappoint. It gives a...
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'Sitting on a sofa, playing games of chance' by Christina Koning
My latest novel, Game of Chance - the second in a series of detective stories set in the late 1920s - centres, as the title suggests, around a game of cards, specifically, Solo Whist. I chose this...
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Bridewell, Bedlam and Bluecoats - by Ann Swinfen
If you were a pauper in Tudor England, how could you survive? Or would you survive at all?Throughout the Middle Ages, there had been two principal supports for the poor – the church and the rich...
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A VISIT TO CASTLE RISING by Adèle Geras
On a perfect April day, when the trees were "coming into leaf/like something almost being said," (Philip Larkin) I visited Castle Rising with Stephanie Nettell. The older readers of this blog will...
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'The Sanctuary That Made Heads Spin' by Karen Maitland
St John of Beverly on the Minster.Photo: Graham HermonYesterday (7th May) was the Saints Day of St. John of Beverley, one of the few men who can claim to have frightened William the Conqueror, even...
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Food for Thought by Caroline Lawrence
I've been thinking about food a lot recently because I'm going to be talking about Roman cuisine at the end of this month as part of an exhibition called Food For Thought at the Corinium Museum in...
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April competitionThe winners of Kate Forsyth's The Wild Girl are:Elizabeth HopkinsonPippa GoodhartElspeth ScottLauren GentMarjorie TaylorCongratulationsTo claim your prize, please contact Susie Dunlop...
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Monsters and Mermaids in the Orchard - Michelle Lovric
A few weeks ago I received a delightful letter from Mariagrazia Dammicco, garden historian and writer. In her company, I have spent many idyllic hours over the years learning about the historical and...
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Going the Distance, by Laurie Graham
Anyone over the age of sixty will remember the school exercise books of the 1950s that had, on the back cover, multiplication tables and a list of arcane weights and measures: bushels and pecks, rods,...
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Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy by Tanya Landman
For anyone who’s even vaguely interested in history or politics Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy is a fascinating exhibition. For a historical novelist, it’s an inspiration.I’d heard about it on the...
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THIS MONTH I'M ON ABOUT SIX-PACKS – Elizabeth Fremantle
Matthew Macfadyen as a smouldering Mr DarcyFor some weeks now we've been bombarded with images of a sultry Aidan Turner, topless, with a tanned and rippling six pack. Now personally, enjoyable though...
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The Big Haboob by Kate Lord Brown
As I write, the doors and windows are rattling, sand piling up on the steps outside. The shamal is blowing flurries of sand along the road, snaking, disappearing like djinns. The wind is always...
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WRITING LAST TRAIN FROM KUMMERSDORF - A LITTLE BIT OF MY SOUL, by Leslie Wilson
My novel 'Last Train from Kummersdorf' will be reissued next month, and it made me think about its inception and the ingredients that went into it. I'd started to write it seven years before it was...
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