The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Monarchs Anonymous is a fun, frenetic show that should appeal to a variety of ages. The premise is a therapy session involving multiple monarchs. The figures taking part are Marie Antionette, Mansa Musa, Charles II, Henry VIII and Princess Sophia Duleep Singh....
Philip Larkin in his poem Annus Mirabilis highlighted the year 1963 as a time of momentous transition. The end of the Lady Chatterley ban, the rise of The Beatles, the beginnings of the sexual revolution, all seductive ingredients for me, an author writing a novel...
Views on age and life’s milestones have changed over time. In the last century average life expectancy exceeded what we would call middle age for the first time and in the process changed perspectives. Empress Matilda, one of the subjects of Eighteen, married Henry V...
AoH Book Club: Sarah Gristwood on the Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe Sarah, what are your thoughts on Game of Queens today, nearly ten years after it was published? It's one of the books of which I am most proud - because I really did feel that for the...
Herstory: An Aspects of History Anthology Women’s history is often being turned over, reevaluated, rediscovered, and retold as we understand further how stereotypes at the time heavily influenced how women were remembered. This is opening our eyes to forgotten figures...
Josie Dale-Jones is a force to be reckoned with as she takes to Shoreditch Town Hall for her show, A Little Inquest Into What We Are All Doing Here. The show is an exploration of topics such as censorship, free speech, artistic freedom, and cancel culture. In 2022,...
Lucy, Clara & Olivia was your debut novel. Was the idea for the book long in gestation? While Clara & Olivia is my first published novel, I did write two novels in the twenties that I never managed to get published. I think of these as my practice novels, my...
Earthquake at Antioch Six months following the devastating earthquake of February 6th 2023, the dust has finally settled across Southern Turkey and Northern Syria. Rescue efforts are over and the attention of the Turkish government and international aid community is...
History has not been kind to Caroline Lamb. The writer and lover of Lord Byron, who characterised him as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, has generally been dismissed by his biographers, and those of her husband, William Lamb, the future Lord Melbourne, as an...
A Persian Journey ‘This Persian journey was the best in all my life’. I came across this note in a diary my grandmother Dorothy (‘Dottie’) Wellesley had kept during a trip to Persia in 1927. She added these words nearly twenty-five years later when she was writing her...
