Winston goes to war How do wars start?  Usually, far too optimistically.  On 4 August, a hundred years tomorrow as if you needed remindi...

This blog is coming out on my book birthday - Dawn is dawning, so think of me singing a little round of happy birthday as I sit in my study...

Eve Edwards Helen McCarthy In conversation...two women of the world.  Helen McCarthy, Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary Universit...

This is not so much a post about history but about the vagaries of publishing historical fiction for a younger reader.  You see, I always as...

This year is a long dreaded year in our family.  I knew it was coming when I had my second child in 1998.  Two children, two years apart - t...

For me, part of being a historical novelist is challenging myself with the question: in this era, what kind of person would I have been?  On...

Over Christmas I chanced upon the original Starwars films (parts now called IV and V) being shown on TV.  These were the cult films of my sc...

Now the New Year has arrived and we are packing away the tinsel and glitter, I wanted to ask if you have a favourite or a hated Christmas ...

I'm living with the builders at the moment.  A medium-sized extension on the side of our house appears to demand a foundation hole the s...

This October, the builders of Britain have been issued a challenge by a new health minister, Jane Ellison : they are to shape up, pull up an...

Terrible dark things happen to British men when they go to India - at least according to the fertile imaginations of the late Victorian shor...

Mark Twain was a clever chap. For research for my next book project, I am thinking about late nineteenth century writers and he bobbed to...

It is probably a familiar moment for many if not all of us: you've had a bad day, so you just pop down to the shops and cheer yourself u...

I wandered into my kitchen yesterday to find seventeen-year-old daughter watching what I thought was Game of Thrones . Jeremy Irons looka...

Have you seen the Baz Luhrmann version of The Great Gatsby ?  I went last week with some trepidation as the critics had been cool and found ...

I have been listening to the recent BBC Radio 4 programme, Noise: A Human History by David Hendy  (you can catch some of it on iPlayer if yo...

Building on my last blog post in March - history is annoying - I have decided to tackle the even more contentious issue of history being poi...