On the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire, Imogen Robertson visits the Museum of London’s dedicated exhibition. London is thick with the memory of flames this month. As you might have noticed given the flurry of events, programmes, talks and books currently available, it’s 350 years since the Great Fire tore through the city destroying […]
Hooked on History: Andrew Taylor
Novelist Andrew Taylor explores the childhood favourites that made him the writer he is today. I have a theory that childhood reading maketh the man or woman. A few of the books I read and re-read as a child and young teenager survived the Stalinist purges of later adolescence and young adulthood. These are the books […]
The Ashes of London by Andrew Taylor
Andrew Taylor is the award-winning and best-selling crime fiction author of, perhaps most notably, the Lydmouth series, but he has proved equally skilful at finely wrought, and solidly researched historical fiction, including the 2003 bestseller The American Boy, an unforgettable mystery set in London during the childhood of Edgar Allan Poe. In The Ashes of […]
The Private Life of a Regency Poppet
“As for what the women really thought, we must try The Journal of Clarissa Trant (1800-1832), edited by her granddaughter C.G.Luard and published by The Bodley Head in 1925 …. Clarissa Trant is a poppet, both in speech and appearance. She is neither a prude nor too coy, and sparkles on for more than three […]