Tate Britain is currently showing a wonderful exhibition called Apocalypse – on the work of John Martin, who specialised in huge and wildly popular paintings of biblical and ancient world disasters. I highly recommend it. During my research John Martin hovered on the edge of my reading, because I became very interested in his equally notorious and insane brother […]
Writing and Researching
The (Twilight) Writing Zone
So, it’s in. I hadn’t realised before writing this book how addictive working on it would become. Worrying signs have included: writing in pyjamas or the nearest thing which came to hand omitting to clean teeth all day getting irritated for having to break off when you need the loo or to have a bath not […]
Submitting the Final Edit
So, today was the day I submitted the final ms for OUP: two copies of my 108K text with e- and hard-copies of my 35 chosen images and the four maps I’ve drawn up. All on a memory stick too. I spent last week on leave working on the last edits, the acknowledgements and the […]
The Invisible Women
I’ve worked hard to get women into my book. It’s not been easy. A day-conference I attended earlier this year run by the History of Parliament Trust contained a whole session on their problem of undertaking a decades-long academic enterprise which, by definition, had to concentrate on the biographies of MPs and Lords before the 20th century – […]
The Work-Write Balance
The last ten days have been further practice for me in how to squeeze research and writing time around work and home life; something which people often me ask about. I’m getting quite used to it now. The main thing is to get straight down to writing whenever you have a slot available, and to identify and schedule those slots in advance. […]
The Looooooooooooong 18th Century
I recently enjoyed a little lunchtime flurry on Twitter after asking about when the “Long” 18th century ended, in people’s opinion. That’s because The Day Parliament Burned Down makes the case for 1834 as one of the possible dates when the 18th century comes to a halt for various reasons. (In fact, I also argue that 1834 […]