All about reading good books & writing good books.
If my great-grandmother had lived in the 17th Century there’s a good chance she would have been named a ‘wise woman’. Great-grandmother Margaret was ‘fey’: she knew things. Take for instance the time she and her husband, who was a forester, took a few precious days holiday in a remote area of the Mountains of Mourne. Continue reading “Suspect Women”
Sandra Danby asked various people about their ‘comfort reads’ – which books do they always go back to? Here is my response.
My ‘Porridge & Cream’ novels are in the House of Níccolò series by the late Scots author Dorothy Dunnett. I became hooked on her sixteenth century Game of Kings series featuring the exquisite Francis Crawford of Lymond in the 1970s. Continue reading “My ‘PORRIDGE & CREAM’”
Roller-skating in the Hindu Kush.
(Background research for The Empress Emerald)
‘Horrible looking hills loomed nearer and nearer and then you saw some sort of crack going up through the hills – and this was the Khyber Pass; great slabs of rock towering up on either side of you.’ (Ed Brown, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, 1930s)
‘I set the defaulters to work with pick axes Continue reading “The Great Game.”
