Operation Tulip: Deborah Swift
Operation Tulip is the third and final book in Deborah Swift’s World War 2 Secret Agent series. Our heroine, Nancy Callaghan, started the war with the SOE, as a cipher clerk at their offices in Baker Street. She went on, though, to become a field agent, working as a...
Ice Houses
A couple of years ago I wrote a post about ice houses. English Heritage had just restored the ice house at Marble Hill, which is very close to where I live. They claimed that the ice house at Marble Hill was particularly important as ice houses are rare. This made me...
A visit to Cambridge
There was no blog post last week as I was away in Cambridge so I'm sticking with the idea of short posts with pictures and a bit more about daily life. It means that I get fewer views on my blog but people who do read it seem to like it. Most of the colleges are...
Writing (and other) Life
I'm still playing with the idea of shorter blog posts which don't involve researching anything so that I can share historical stuff with you. So this week, here's a bit about how I've been using some of the time I haven't been writing my blog. I've spent an afternoon...
Selling my books
I’ve been taking part in #HistFicMay where historical fiction authors are invited to answer one question a day about their work. Yesterday’s question was: ‘How do you advertise your book?’ I’d been thinking about blogging about marketing for a while and this question,...
A scandal at court
Regular readers will know that I spend a lot of time at Marble Hill House where Henrietta Howard lived from 1734 until her death in 1767. Marble Hill became the centre of a circle of some of the leading writers of the day, including Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and...
Malmaison: a home fit for an Empress
In Burke and the Pimpernel Affair, Burke visits the Empress Josephine at her home at Malmaison. Until I started researching the story, I had no idea that Malmaison still existed and is a short bus ride from the centre of Paris. Back then, I couldn’t go to see it...
In Paris with James Burke
I really enjoyed writing Burke and the Pimpernel Affair. It’s a straightforward spy story with more than a nod to Baroness Orczy’s hero, freeing French prisoners from Paris gaols. Much of the story revolves round the Conciergerie which was the main prison during the...
A Very Short Blog Post
It's late in the day to be posting my Friday offering, but I've got an excuse. This was earlier today. It's been an exciting few days, following in Burke's footsteps from Burke and the Pimpernel Affair. There'll be a long post about it next week, but right now I'm...
The White Rajah
Last week Tales of Empire was available free on Amazon. I hope you got a copy. If you didn't, it will set you back a whole 99p this week. I'm never sure about whether free promotions really boost sales of books, but in this case book sales aren't the important thing....