There’s no reason to be snobbish about council houses, says Lizzie Lane. For the people who moved into the first ones, built in the interwar period, they were the clean and comfortable ‘homes for heroes’ they’d been promised – far better than the crowded, pest-infected slums they left behind. Sturdy semi detached and terraced houses […]
Watercolour research: a historical writer’s technique
For Jean Moran, author of Tears of the Dragon and Summer of the Three Pagodas, research is a thing to be applied lightly, like watercolour, not thickly, like oil paint, as she tells Historia. The titles I wrote as Lizzie Lane centred on the early 20th century, and World War Two in particular, and as […]
Review: The Name of the Rose: TV series
John Turturro’s TV adaptation of The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco’s dark murder mystery set in a Benedictine abbey in 14th-century Italy, began screening on BBC2 in October, 2019. Author Jean Goodhind has read the book and seen the film; how will this version compare? The moment I saw this in my TV schedule […]