sutton040

Recently, we’ve been remembering the two World Wars: rationing, evacuees, bombs, black-outs…  I thought I’d jot down a few of the family stories my parents told me about their war-time experiences because they seem, to me, a little different to the image of the war years we are fed by more ‘official’ history. My grandad, George Price was born in 1900 and so was too young for the First War. At fourteen, he was already the wage-earner of the family. He left school and started work at 12 because his father, a miner, was out of work. He lived with his family in a row of cottages with slate roofs. Grandad at the brickyard. He's on the right. No idea who the other two are. At the time there was a tremendous scare about zeppelins, which were expected to float overhead at any moment, dropping explosives or incendaries. My youthful Grandad’s contribution to the war effort was to take the metal dustbin lids and shy them up onto the roofs. They landed on the slates with a terrific echoing cla...

To win either of the two books featured yesterday jsut answer the following question in the Comments section: "What book set in a European country, in the past, is your favourite and why?" Then copy your answer to: maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk Closing date: 7th October We are afraid our competitions are available to UK Followers only. Good luck!  

This month's "guest post" is a bit unusual. Don't worry - you'll still have a chance to win a book tomorrow; it's not that different! Readers may be aware that I run, with my husband, a small independent publishing company called The Greystones Press. We publish YA and adult fiction and most of our books have a historical element. Take the two we are bringing out on 4th October. The adult novel is by Sophie Masson and is called Black Wings: It is set in the French Revolution and covers many years in the lives of four people who started out as childhood friends but whose lives are pulled apart by the changes in France. It’s 1788 in the Vendée in western France, and change is in the air. Reform is being talked of in the great world beyond, in Paris, and even the peaceful village inhabited by Jacques Verdun and his friends – aristocratic painter Edmond de Bellegarde, his beautiful cousin Flora, and young farmer Pierre Bardon – seems touche...

Rachel Hore is the author of nine novels, nearly all with historical settings.   Last Letter Home was chosen for the Richard & Judy Book Club in association with W.H. Smith.   She lives in Norwich and teaches creative writing part-time at the University of East Anglia.  We hope that Rachel will soon be joining us on The History Girls. Meanwhile, here is a taster of her work. Researching LAST LETTER HOME Research for an historical novel can be a chaotic affair.   I’d always imagined a process whereby I’d read everything relevant I could lay my hands on, visit the sites, study objects in museums all before I began planning and writing the fiction.   Unfortunately, I’m not the sort of novelist who discovers exactly what interests me about a subject until I start writing.   My relationship with research is therefore one that changes throughout the journey to the finished work. I thought it interesting to reflect on that journey with my recently published n...

Frida Kahlo 1907-1954  Image courtesy of Museo Frida Kahlo. © Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Archives, Banco de México.  My oldest grand-daughter, Matilda, is 9 and a self-confessed ‘Victorian Expert.’ So for a summer holiday treat we went to the Victoria & Albert museum in London. After splashing in the fountain and admiring the Victorian frocks, we queued for the Frida Kahlo exhibition. Matilda was fascinated by the surreal self-portraits with Kahlo’s signature mono-brow, painted using a mirror attached to her bed. After a near-fatal bus crash at 18 years, she was in constant pain and unable to walk. ‘She was a woman that suffered many injuries but who was able to transform this pain into art,’ wrote Hilda Trujillo, Director of the Museo Frida Kahlo.  “I’d rather sit on the floor of the market of Toluca,” said Kahlo, “and sell tortillas than have anything to do with those artistic bitches.” Now her image sells like hot tortillas. photo Nikolas Muray, 1939. As well a...

                                                                         May 1968, Paris These photos were taken by Bruno Barbey who was a twenty-five-year-old photographer in '68 and a superb visual chronicler of the events of May 1968. He wrote later, "I went with Cartier-Bresson to buy helmets to protect us from the stones, but with them we couldn't use our Leicas.' It is always an exciting moment for an author when she receives an email from her editor confirming the date of publication of her next novel. That has been one of the highs of this week for me. My new novel, THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF, is to be published in Britain on 16th May 2019. I had hoped to have the book out on the shelves this autumn to coincide with the fifty-year anniversary of 1968 in France, a year that changed modern F...

      One morning last week I went on a rather doleful shopping trip to Oxford Street. In the clothes departments shop assistants outnumbered customers and full racks of garments pleaded to be liked. As I walked through those designer mausoleums I remembered my childhood, when my shopaholic mother and grandmother took me on all day shopping trips . After an orgy of trying on clothes in bustling department stores these trips ended in the ground floor cafeteria in Selfridges with me, as a fat little girl, standing up to eat an enormous ice cream called a Knickerbocker Glory. Now that some people think that department stores will disappear from all our High Streets, it seems a good idea to remember their interesting pasts.    Towards the end of the 19th century Oxford Street changed from residential to retail. The first department stores were exciting and innovative. In Zola’s wonderful novel Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), a department store in Paris is the m...

Husband and sons at Carcassonne.  This is short blog for my turn this month because I am packing for an imminent holiday/research break.  By the time you read this, I will be chilling out somewhere in Monmouthshire! I don't think that in the last 20 years I have ever been on a holiday that hasn't involved research for a novel.  Fortunately my family, has indulged my habit of dragging them to locations that involve castles, cathedrals and historical sights and sites.  Mostly in the UK, although we did venture to the South of France one year and climbed the Cathar Stronghold of Montsegur (where I almost put my hand on an adder (see photo taken by my husband above me!) and dined among the magnificent towers and turrets of Carcassonne. Our various dogs have all joined in the fun and had a marvelous time exploring nooks and crannies, although a small collie-cross we had, was very disturbed by Middleham castle and refused to go inside! At Pembroke Castle, taking a holiday ...

I usually post for Authors Electric and, a little while ago, my colleague, Griselda Heppel, wrote there about how annoying it is when people make wild unsubstantiated guesses about Shakespeare's life, based on very little evidence. For instance, he left his wife his 'second best bed,' so, obviously, he didn't think much of her. And she was eight years older than him so, obviously it was an unwanted marriage of convenience. And he went away to be a playwright in London, so quite plainly, he hated the sight of her. Any of these statements may be true. But it's just as likely that they aren't. They are much made out of very little. The idea that Bill didn't get on with Anne because he was young and carefree and she was such a grumpy old hag is based solely on a line in Twelfth Night: 'Let still the woman take an elder than herself.' This is seized on as a hot-line to Shakespeare's heart. Aha! This is him regretting his unwise marriage a...

Edgar Allan Poe Statue Boston The schools having returned from their holidays, I've just been on mine - trust me the novelty of travelling during term-time will never wear off. We did an East Coast trip this year, visiting Boston and Washington, slightly on edge at the reports of Hurricane Florence although in the end we encountered only minor flooding. The architecture of the two cities shares commonalities - both retain pockets of beautiful nineteenth century clapboard houses and both have eighteenth century nods to ancient Rome and Greece although this is much more marked in Washington's neck-cracking take on empire. I've never felt more like an ant as I did on the Mall.  Both cities are fabulous to visit, but the winner for me was Boston where the Gothic still lingers. One of Boston's most famous residents and one of my favourite authors, if not people, was  Edgar Allen Poe who now has a statue at the Common. It's a wonderful thing - Poe's cloak flares all ...