Music hall and other old songs can provide musical clues in historical fiction — clues which carry even deeper meaning than the remembered snatches of tunes themselves do. Sarah Rayne, who took inspiration from such songs for her latest book, Chalice of Darkness, explains how it works. Old songs and fragments of faded music can […]
The Ghosts of History
Judith Allnatt on the ghosts of history and the inspiration behind her book, The Silk Factory. When a friend told me that she was hearing strange sounds in her house accompanied by a strong smell of soot, despite there being no open fires, it set me wondering what the site had been used for in […]
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 […]