sutton040

Five years ago I posted a piece about a fascinating and little-known Venetian scuola – The Company of Christ and the Good Death , the kind men who retrieved drowned bodies from the canals and provided funerals for those corpses who were not reclaimed by any family or friend. On many afternoons, over many years, I’ve stood wistfully outside this 1644 building at San Marcuola and tried to imagine what it was like inside. It was always closed. Until I could see the interior for myself, I could not use it in my latest novel. My interest was regenerated when I came across this strange painting at the tiny museum above Sant’Apollonia. It shows the Company at work, accompanying a corpse, dressed in extraordinary and rather terrifying costumes. (Apologies for the bad photograph, snatched against the rules.) Then, on a recent Saturday afternoon, I limped off the vaporetto at San Marcuola. I was tired, full of notes that desperately needed transcribing (before even I myself would be un...

Our Saturnalia host, Steve Cockings by Caroline Lawrence For many years, my motive for studying Classics and writing historical fiction has been  an intense desire to know what it would really have been like in the ancient world of Greece and Rome. So when I was invited to a Saturnalia banquet in Bedford around this time last year, I jumped at the chance.  Steve Cockings is a re-enactor who loves to collect real and replica artefacts. He is a stickler for detail and has read several early drafts of my books, always coming back with valuable corrections. Alisa, Simon, Caroline and Elizabeth Alisa fights in many countries There were five of us in all. Steve, his wife, gladiatrix Alisa and her husband Simon, also a re-enactor. We all dressed up in Roman garb. Although we didn't recline and there were no frescoes on the walls, we ate recipes from Apicius off real Samian plates with antique Roman spoons to the flickering light of oil-lamps. Roman music played softly in the backgrou...

St Michael and All Angels, Princetown, Dartmoor Photographer: Theroadislong Situated 436 metres above sea level, St Michael and All Angels in Princetown, Devon is one of the highest locations for a church in the country. But it is also unique in being the only church in England to have been constructed by American prisoners of war . Most British people know that Napoleonic prisoners were incarcerated in England, but we often forget that American POWs were also imprisoned in England at the beginning of the 19th century. The granite church sits on the top of windswept and wild Dartmoor, close to the notorious Dartmoor Prison. The building of the church began in 1812, by French prisoners and was completed in 1815 by American POWs. The prisoners had to quarry the hard stone in all weathers, summer and winter, shape them and then transport the great blocks to the site, before each piece could be hoisted in place. During the war of 1812 between Britain and America, which lasted 32 months, m...

Below is a photograph of the book I'm reviewing today.  It's not in the same class as all the other pictures on this post, which were taken by Jane Brocket, the author of How to look at stained glass.  However, it has the advantage of showing a glimpse  of the back cover. Jane Brocket knows a great deal about a great many things. I came to her blog (link in the author biog below) because it was beautiful. She posted photos of flowers, cakes, knitted socks, and the creative nail polish choices of  her teenage daughter. She travelled and noticed things as she went and drew them to her readers' attention. She is someone who's endlessly curious about  many things and who moreover makes a point of becoming enormously well-informed about everything  she intends to write about.  She's originally from Stockport and the first time I met her was in a café in Didsbury, Manchester. Now she's moved to Cambridge, I have met her all over again. My...

In just over a week, on 14th December 2018 it will be the centenary of the election where some women in Britain and Ireland had the right to vote for the first time in a parliamentary election. Last week in Dublin I saw commemorative posters of Constance Markievicz on almost every lamp-post. Markievicz was of course the first woman elected to Westminter, though as an Irish Republican she never took up that seat, recognising Dáil Eireann instead. I knew then that I’d have to find something fresh to say about the 1918 election for my upcoming History Girls post. commemorative posters in Dublin  Fresh? How? I’ve been living with this date for over two years, since I started writing my 2017 novel   Star By Star  which focuses on that election. I’ve done suffragist-themed events from Aberdeeen down to London, and from Derry to Kerry. I've written lots of relevant articles and blogs. I’m pretty much electioned-out, especially as during that time I also found myself campaigning ...

Photographs and film footage from the past are always evocative, now matter how shaky or blurred.  Recently, advances in technology are being applied to them, partly in the name of preservation and partly as a way of bringing them even more vividly to modern audiences.*   Have a look at A Trip Through Paris , France below -  Instead of the jerky movements we're used to seeing in early film, the footage has been slowed down to a more natural pace.  Instead of adding a (sometimes really dire) music sound track, there are the noises of horse traffic, bicycle bells and people talking.  Watching this, I had  a real sense of people wearing clothes, not people in costume.  I l oved the kid who stood right in front of the camera until poked out of the way with an umbrella.   And those moving walkways in the snow - if I had seen this before writing  Slightly Jones and the Case of the Hidden City , set in 1890s Paris, I would definitely have...

  In Lady Wilde’s ‘Ancient Legends of Ireland’ there’s a story about a young man, a poet, who attempts to seduce a farmer’s daughter. He’s used to having his wicked way with girls, for we're told that Irish poets were known for possessing ‘the power of fascination by the glance … so that they could make themselves loved and followed by any girl they liked.’     With this particular girl, however, the power doesn’t seem to work very well at first. The poet arrives at her farm and begs for a drink of milk, but the young woman happens to be on her own in the house – the maids are busy churning in the dairy – so she refuses to let him in. Annoyed by this, the poet takes action. Lady Wilde continues:   The young poet fixed his eyes earnestly on her face for some time in silence, then slowly turning round left the house and walked towards a small grove of trees just opposite. There he stood for a few moments resting against a tree, and facing the house as if to take one m...

The Turn of the Screw opens on Christmas Eve with a group of guests sitting around a fire listening to a story that is said to be, 'gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve, in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be'. Henry James was alluding to the tradition of telling ghost stories during the dark winter months, a practice which goes back thousands of years to when people, lacking iPads and Netflix, would gather at the fireside to share folk tales of spirits and ghouls. ‘A sad tale's best for winter,’ Maximillius says in The Winter's Tale . ‘I have one of sprites and goblins.’ A little help from the Victorians From A Christmas Carol, 1938 So when in 1843 Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol – in which Scrooge is tormented by a series of ghosts on the night before Christmas – he was building on an age-old custom. However, it was one that he and other Victorians did much to consolidate and commercialise. The Christmas issues of the magazines Dickens edited ( Hous...