It is rare that a definitive truth emerges from history, like that of Richard III’s remains, proving that he did indeed suffer from scolios...

This time last year I was asked to give a workshop on writing historical fiction at Guildford Book Festival , and although as ever I was ama...

If you dropped in at the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern recently, you might have seen Tacita Dean's work, Film , which was the twelfth ...

Everyone knows that writers are also readers, and by writers I don't (for once) just  mean novelists. We need books, and we need more bo...

When hanging out with my historical fictioneering friends, I sometimes feel a bit inferior. So many of them spent their student years readin...

The other day I was talking to a writer friend about my current project, and she urged me to read a particular novel set in the same period,...

A few weeks ago, my daughter's school Chamber Choir was singing Evensong in Southwark Cathedral, so I went along to listen. Many years a...

In Tuesday's post, "Outside the Frame" , A L Berridge was saying that while the physical presence that an old photograph recor...

As soon as you start researching a historical novel, you discover that the past really is a foreign country, and they really do do things di...

It was 2007, and I was whizzing along the A64 in North Yorkshire because in the novel that wasn't yet A Secret Alchemy one of my narrat...