Spent part of Bank Holiday Saturday mooching round Blackwells and Waterstones in Oxford, after discovering that the Bodleian was shut because of the holiday. (Memo to self: check the website next time). After a minor tantrum outside the Divinity School, I reconciled myself to following up some references the following weekend instead. In the bookshops I had a relaxing browse, feeling smug that a new biog of Edward I has a citation of one of my articles in it, and also that Ian Mortimer’s bestselling Timetraveller’s Guide to Medieval England, has a footnote to another one of my articles. Small crumbs maybe, but it made me happy, saddo that I am. Then accosted in Waterstones by a properly sad person doing a booksigning of some terrible-looking (?privately printed) biographies, and vowed that if I ever get to the heady heights of doing booksignings (ha!) that I will never behave like that myself
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.
