The festival of Halloween has become so popular that almost every street you walk will have windows aglow with pumpkin-head lanterns, signalling that any children out to celebrate are welcome to come and ‘Trick or Treat’. Many of those children will be dressed as skeletons, witches and ghosts — some of them might even wear […]
The Faithful by Juliet West
The Faithful is a compelling read where intimate personal narratives are influenced by historical events leading up to World War II. At the centre of the novel is the character of Hazel, to whom we are first introduced in the summer of 1935. By this time in the teenaged Hazel’s life her well-to-do parents have […]
The Last Days of Leda Grey by Essie Fox
Essie Fox has established a fine reputation as a writer of gothic novels and though her previous books have been set in Victorian times, the Edwardian era of silent movies seems like a very natural backdrop for gothic fiction. The images in these old flickering black and white films with their beautifully mute but vampish […]
The Ghosts of Silent Film
I’ve long had a fascination with the art of Victorian photography – how those grainy old sepia images enable us to peer straight through a historical mirror into the past: for the very first time to be able to see exactly how people looked back then. Even the sparkle in their eyes. Because of this […]
The Muse for Alice in Wonderland
This year, 2015, is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the classic Victorian fantasy for which the author, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, used the pen name of Lewis Carroll. But it was in 1864 when Dodgson (then a young clergyman and mathematics don at Oxford) presented a girl who was twelve […]