Sign up for my free newsletter on Substack
Who lived in Park Lane (the cheap end)?
WHAT DO YOU think when you hear the words Park Lane? Do think Oooooh posh? After all, Park Lane, is Mayfair, once home to millionaires, celebritiesand aristocrats. The money is still there, of course, but now Park Lane is mostly hotels, luxury car showrooms and casinos.
Mr Giovanelli, the cancan and the demise of Highbury Barn
In my WIP (work in progress, or more accurately WISP, work in slow progress) some of my characters go to Highbury Barn in north London and witness some lewd behaviour…
Continue Reading Mr Giovanelli, the cancan and the demise of Highbury Barn
“A Distant Memory”
I recently rediscovered this short story, which I wrote as English homework on 1 November 1969, when I was eleven. Miss Thomas gave it an A minus minus and a “Quite good”…
Eugène Appert, who photoshopped the Paris Commune
DEEP IN THE stacks archives at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is a small fat photograph album, barely eleven and a half centimetres tall. It has been made for a specific purpose: to hold cartes de visite, the palm-sized photographic ‘calling cards’ that were popular in the latter part of the nineteenth century…
Continue Reading Eugène Appert, who photoshopped the Paris Commune
Louise Michel tours the Lambeth workhouse
Louise Michel is tangential to the action that takes place in Paris in my forthcoming book Marguerite. There are archive sources that suggest that during the final bloody week of the Commune Marguerite fought alongside Michel on the barricades at Clignancourt but they are, in my view, unreliable…
We’re off to Millbank
FROM 1818 TO 1890, when it was torn down to create the Tate Gallery, Millbank Penitentiary was home to thousands of prisoners, including, for a few months, the subject of my work in progress, Marguerite Diblanc…
