To Birmingham on business, but managed to squeeze in an hour’s research on the train there and back, and, arriving early at the City Library for an event, was able to use their reading rooms for another half hour. Slow work, ploughing through three different people’s accounts of what they did between ten and eleven in the morning on the day of the fire; all of them trying to wriggle out of responsibility; all of them putting blame on someone else.
About Caroline Shenton
Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist and historian. She was formerly Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London, and before that was a senior archivist at the National Archives. Her book The Day Parliament Burned Down won the Political Book of the Year Award in 2013 and Mary Beard called it 'microhistory at its absolute best' while Dan Jones considered it 'glorious'. Its acclaimed sequel, Mr Barryís War, about the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, was a Book of the Year in 2016 for The Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine and was described by Lucy Worsley as 'a real jewel, finely wrought and beautiful'. During 2017 Caroline was Political Writer in Residence at Gladstone's Library.
