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Travelling in the Past by Katherine Webb
The fashion for ‘vintage’ seems to grow all the time - clothes and home decor and hobbies that either are or have been made to look old. As someone who has always loved old buildings and old things and...
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Was Madeleine Smith guilty as charged? - by Ann Swinfen
In 1857 the trial took place in Edinburgh of Madeleine Smith, the daughter of an eminent Glasgowarchitect, charged with the murder of her lover, Emile L’Angelier, by the administration of arsenic....
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Women, History and Publishing by Imogen Robertson
I fell down a wiki hole this morning, but perhaps the guiding hand of the muse was upon me, because I ended up discovering the strange, and rather depressing story of Cherubina de Gabriak. In 1909 the...
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Alhambra by Kate Lord Brown
Few places seem as paradoxically familiar and exotic as the Alhambra. The romantic paintings of the Orientalists and the eulogies to nightingales and moonlight, to silver mountains and Moorish gold...
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Victorian Plant Hunters; their legacy in our gardens, by Leslie Wilson
This is the upper Min River Valley, near Songpan, Tibetan Sichuan, up which we travelled in a Chinese mini-bus tour in the year 2000, and saw buddleia growing wild - truly wild, not feral, as it does...
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A BIT OF A MISH-MASH By Elizabeth Chadwick
My current work in progress, TEMPLAR SILKS is the story of the three years that the English knight and future regent of England, William Marshal, spent on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in order to lay...
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Eva Tucker, 1929 - 2015 by Miranda Miller
Occasionally we are lucky enough to meet someone who makes us feel we can touch events that happened before we were born. For me, my friend Eva Tucker was such a person. I first met her at a PEN...
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THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER - My new novel, Carol Drinkwater
Any author reading this blog who is two weeks away from publication will know the nail-biting angst I am suffering. Those days leading up to the release of a new work... So, I won’t describe any of the...
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Joyce Grenfell by Janie Hampton
Joyce Grenfell with her cook Rene Easden, 1938The writer and entertainer Joyce Grenfell was born 106 years ago this month. By the time she retired in 1973, she had performed on four continents, in...
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A Blustery Obsession by Julie Summers
Like many of my fellow countrymen and women, I am fixated by the weather. The shipping forecast can fill me with overwhelming excitement when there are gales in all areas. The poetry of the Beaufort...
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Looking for Margaret - a very modern Medieval by Catherine Hokin
Our guest for January is Catherine Hokin, who talks here about the subject of her first historical novel.She says of hereself:Catherine is a Glasgow-based author with a degree in History from...
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My Cabinet of Curiosities: A Chestful of Treasures by Elizabeth Laird
Cassandra Winslow's chestMiss Winslow was a well-to-do farmer's daughter in Oxfordshire, and this chest contained the trousseau she took into her marriage in around 1810. Remarkably, many items still...
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January competition
To win one of three copies of Catherine Hokin's Blood and Roses, about Margaret of Anjou,Give your answer to the following question in the Comments below:"Which strong woman from the past do you think...
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The Celts by Mary Hoffman
By the time you read this, The Celts: Art and Identity exhibition at the British Museum will be over; I nearly missed it myself. But if you are in Scotland you can see it at the National Museum of...
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Discovering what characters eat - Gillian Polack
Food history is important to me. When I wroteThe Time of the Ghosts, I made sure that every single character’s cooking and eating habits reflected their lives. You can deduce who has lived where and...
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On gluttony, by Vanora Bennett
So January is over, and with it that month of post-Christmas penance. You may have spent it dry or dieting, as I did. The start of February, nowadays, is when many people start again with a clean...
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The Wild Hunt Rides Over Paris - Katherine Langrish
Around about a year ago I spent a few days in Paris with my daughter: we stayed in Montmartre, which I didn't know very well in spite of having once lived in France for four years, close to...
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ROM, I Think I Love You by Joan Lennon
From time to time on The History Girls, people share museums and exhibitions that they've visited that they think you might not have come across or that they just plain loved.* And for me, the Royal...
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PETALS AND BULLETS...A STORY OF 'ORGANISED ALTRUISM' by Lydia Syson
Dorothy Morris is shown here sitting in the early morning sun with a very young patient on the roof of a children’s hospital in Murcia, Spain, in 1938, at a time when the refugee crisis caused by the...
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MANCHESTER JUNE 15th, 1996 by Adèle Geras
Twenty years ago....a long time ago...once upon a time...back in the day, terrorists had much better manners. On the morning of June 15th (a most beautiful, sunny day in Manchester) the IRA rang up...
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