Angelica Paintress of Minds, my novel about the eighteenth -century artist Angelica Kauffman, was published by The Barbican Press in 2020. Publication was carefully timed to coincide with an exhibition of her work at the Royal Academy. Then Covid happened and the exhibition, together with so much else, was cancelled. So you can imagine how delighted I was when this excellent show opened at the Royal Academy in March. I particularly admire her portraits and self -portraits.    This portrait she did of the great actor David Garrick displays her talent for empathy and warmth ..read more

Whenever I cast my vote I feel I can hear the cheers of all the women suffragists and suffragettes who worked so hard to win that right for me, but when I was posting my ballot paper this time, I wondered how many countries in the world still don't give women the right to vote.  I was amazed and pleased to discover that technically it's only one. In Vatican City elections only cardinals of the Catholic Church (all men) are allowed to vote for a new pope. However, in looking this up, I discovered that the right to vote and the experience on election day can be two different matters ..read more

  Polish Resistance in World War II   Members of the Polish resistance (Polish Institute of National Remembrance)   June 6, 2024, marked the 80th anniversary of Operation Overlord and the D-Day landingsin Normandy and although it was a success, many people lost their lives prior to that in the struggle to fight Nazi tyranny. From the very beginning of World War II, resistance groups started to form in every occupied country in Europe, the Middle East and the Far East, but the first organisation was in Poland in the winter of 1939, and was led by a Major Henryk Dobrzański, known ..read more

 Writing books can be quite a lonely business. In the past few years, post COVID, I've occasionally taken a table at Fairs, along with fellow historical fiction author Margaret Skea, to sell my books and chat to readers, or potential readers – and to other stall holders.  Recently I found myself at an Antiques Fair – my books are historical fiction so I thought it was roughly a fit to sell them there – and grew curious about some of the memorabilia the neighbouring stall holder was selling. One particular display drew my attention. 'It's a Dead Man's Penny,' said Neil Watson ..read more

  A statue of wine-pickers in Puligny-Montrachet A few days ago, I set off from our Olive Farm overlooking the Bay of Cannes in the south of France on a nine-hour drive to our northern home east of Paris situated a few miles west of the border to the Champagne region. As I was travelling alone, I decided to take the timing at my own speed rather than my husband's more hurried pace. In fact, I decided to break the journey with a stopover when and wherever the mood took me. I love such open-ended choices. It feels more like an adventure than a journey. The sun was shining; it was a very ..read more

This is the story of Percy Pilcher, a man who could have beaten the Wright brothers to their record of first  flight in a powered aircraft if only he had made one crucial decision differently. Born in 1867, Lieutenant Percy Pilcher was a British inventor and a pioneering aviator. He developed and flew several hang gliders, romantically named The Bat, The Beetle, The Gull and The Hawk. Unfortunately, the ideas evoked by these names, of speed, fast directional control, soaring and hovering were incredibly difficult to achieve with the materials and technology available at the time. Perc ..read more

  As an historical novelist, I encounter both joy and tribulation in researching via the internet. Surfing the web provides a plethora of reference articles with helpful hyperlinks to other pages. Woe betide the novelist who is tempted to click on one of these links! You can be transported down a wonderous rabbit hole but end up in the tarpit of research. Instead of writing your novel, you find yourself whiling away hours on fascinating sidetracks. One example of this occurred when I was writing The Golden Dice, the second book in my A Tale of Ancient Rome trilogy. One of my central char ..read more

Death of an EmperorOn the 18th of September in the year 96 CE, a young Imperial slave boy was attending to the shrine to the Lares, the gods of the household, that resided in the bedchamber of the emperor Domitian. Domitian paid very serious attention to religion and proper adherence to it. He favoured the god Jupiter and goddess Minerva, rebuilding the temple of the former after it had been burnt to the ground and holding a special festival at his Alban villa for the latter. Elsewhere in his now 15-year reign he had overseen the trial of a Vestal Virgin accused of breaking her sacred chastity ..read more

 Being interested in spies and all things spying, I just caught the end of this fascinating exhibition at The Imperial War Museum.  I first visited the IWM in the Sixties and have been a regular visitor over the decades. In recent years, my visits were often focused on a particular exhibition which had direct relevance to something I was writing. Fashion On The Ration was really useful when I was writing Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook; Lee Miller: A Woman's War was invaluable as one of my characters was an American photojournalist. I like exhibitions. The mix o ..read more

The iconic portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth in her beetle-wing dress has been a favourite painting of mine for many, many years.                                  I am not alone in my enthusiasm as, with the detachment of someone who had been on stage almost all her life, the actress herself commented: “The picture of me is nearly finished and I think it magnificent. The green and the blue of the dress is splendid, and I think the expression as Lady Macbeth holds ..read more