Sunday 16 October 2011 is the 177th anniversary of the 1834 fire. Today I’m tweeting a ‘live’ feed of events from 1834 in real time on Twitter. I’ve prescheduled the tweets so I can watch as the come through: it will be fascinating to experience it myself in real time, rather than just writing about […]
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The Hard Reality of History Publishing
If you’re writing a history book which is original and scholarly but which you hope has popular appeal too, then the news is pretty grim. The market for such books is extremely tough at the moment. You only have to glance at this photograph to see what I mean. Taken earlier this week at WHSmith in the departure […]
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 – […]
Westminster’s Throne on Wheels
Last week I made a whistle-stop trip to the Museum of London to look at Adam Lee’s 1808 plan of the old Palace of Westminster in their Library. This was a document I had been trying to track down for at least a year, thanks to a garbled footnote. Job done, I headed for the […]
