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An Addictive Resource - Joan Lennon
All I wanted to do was have a quick look at the National Library of Scotland's online resource of Chapbooks Printed in Scotland, just to see if I thought it would be of interest to History Girl...
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'No more Hiroshimas' by Lydia Syson
Thirty years ago a new university friend invited me to come and spend Christmas with her family in Hiroshima. Until I met her, Hiroshima was a word on a banner - an idea, a symbol of something so huge...
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Matisse's Chapel: La Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence by Adèle Geras
This is the long, long hill leading from the centre of Vence, in the South of France up to the Chapelle du Rosaire which Matisse worked on very near the end of his life, between 1949 and 1951. It was...
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The Lynx of Happiness by Karen Maitland
As you may have read in the papers, we had some excitement in Devon recently when Flaviu the lynx, newly arrived at Dartmoor Zoo, escaped and ran wild for a few weeks. Farmers with lambs and...
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Leeches, Lepers & Anal Surgery by Caroline Lawrence
You wait for ages for an exhibition on Ancient Medicine and then two come along at once, both in Chester, no less. It started when I decided to make a flash visit to Chester, AKA Roman Deva, site of...
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Brokeheart Fountain - Michelle Lovric
In recent posts I’ve been exploring ideas that occupied me when I was a ‘packager’ – a shadowy job that entails conceiving, researching, writing, designing and producing books that then come out under...
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Oliver Cromwell's Ely by Katherine Clements
Writing historical fiction involves a lot of research and time spent in libraries, museums and archives. It’s part of the job that I love. But when I’m working on a book, creating a sense of place is...
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Elizabeth Buchan's THE NEW MRS CLIFTON reviewed by Elizabeth Fremantle
Elizabeth Buchan’s latest novel, The New Mrs Clifton, depicts London in 1945 in the aftermath of war. The fractured city, its buildings blasted open, symbolises the psychological scarring and...
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Sanditon - Jane Austen's Psychic Spin on St Leonards on Sea? Catherine Johnson
Sanditon anyone? I am not an Austenophile but this summer I read the unfinished novel begun by Jane Austen just before her death in 1817.Sanditon is Austen's usual - if a little darker - confection of...
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Loss and tragedy in Northern France
by Marie-Louise JensenWherever you go in Northern France, there are memories of the first and second world wars. Even away from the main battlegrounds and cemeteries of the Somme, Verdun and Etaples,...
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The man who painted women in gold
This will be the last of the posts I've written as a result of visiting Vienna in June. We visited several museums and art galleries while we were there, and in every one, there were pictures by Gustav...
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"Blah, Blah, Blah . . ." or Points about Writing Life learnt from...
(As August is the silly season and History Girls are surely in a holiday mood, today’s post is a non-academic diversion plus a few thoughts that mumbled into my mind. A more sensible HG post should...
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The Way We Lived Then - Celia Rees
Compton Verney is currently hosting the Exhibition, Britain in the Fifties - Design and Aspiration, looking back to the time when Harold Macmillan announced that 'most of our people had never had it so...
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A Great Olympian by Katherine Webb
I hope you'll forgive a somewhat truncated post from me this month - it is holiday season, and by the time this goes live I shall be sunning myself (and reading voraciously) on a beach many miles away...
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Managing a Medieval Nunnery - by Ann Swinfen
I’ve long had a vague feeling, at the back of my mind, that the women’s colleges of Oxfordand Cambridge, as created in the nineteenth century, shared many characteristics with medieval nunneries....
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Fire! Fire! by Imogen Robertson
I’ve always felt a bit sorry for people who were actually born in London because they’ll never have the pleasure of a first visit to the capital. I remember mine. I told the patient Beefeaters all...
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Scotland's Pictish Stones and The Lost Story of Guinevere by Catherine Hokin
I have been time-travelling this month in the name of research. Now that book two (fourteenth-century) has been delivered to my agent, I have been delving into the twelfth century for book three and,...
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August 1914: The Enemy Within? by Leslie Wilson
'Two Germans entered the tube at Belsize Park. While the train was in motion they conversed in German, but during the short periods of silence at the stations they relapsed into bad, gutteral French....
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ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE: Going the Distance by Elizabeth Chadwick
It is now four and a half years since I was contracted to write three novels about the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine - THE SUMMER QUEEN, THE WINTER CROWN and THE AUTUMN THRONE. I chose to write about...
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The Royal Free Hospital by Miranda Miller
This hideous 1970s concrete building has loomed over Hampstead Heath for as long as I can remember. Last month I spent a lot of time in it, visiting my daughter and her new babies, and started to...
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