Crisis only narrowly averted when I realised I had forgotten to include a picture of some tallysticks among the illustrations. Idiot.
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Picture Perfect
Things are moving on quickly now. I’ve signed three copies of the contract, and have filled in an author publicity form. Now I have to choose pictures for the book and send a list to OUP before the end of the month, so they can start getting licences for those which I’m not getting from […]
Stage Six: A Publishing Contract!
I’m over the moon to announce that this morning a contract for Conflagration by Oxford University Press dropped through my letterbox. Regular readers of this blog will know that something has been in the offing for at least a month now, but only now am I able to reveal what. I had more than one offer, […]
On the Burning of Parliaments
I’m just back from Berlin where I was attending a conference run by the ECPRD – the association of European Parliamentary libraries. Usually I don’t go to these events as they’re not often about archival stuff; however, this year the theme was “Parliamentary history and its communication to the public” which was right up my street. […]
The Man Who Saved Westminster Hall
Today is the 150th anniversary of the death of Superintendant James Braidwood. He was the man who saved Westminster Hall in the great fire of 1834 through the innovative firefighting techniques he had first developed when fire chief in Edinburgh. His death was both tragic and horribly ironic. He died at the enormous Tooley Street […]
Talking Titles
A yummy lunch today with Lady Antonia Fraser at the Whistler Restaurant at Tate Britain. Tate sits on the site of the Millbank Penitentiary where Joshua Cross (one of the labourers who started the fire) did time. And of course it houses the Turner watercolours of the 1834 fire, along with the rest of the Turner bequest, so […]
