My feline editor is so disgusted at my inability to write regular blogs that she is threatening to take to the keyboard herself. Since...

With little spare money for books when I was growing up, I haunted the local library (using my mother's ticket) and begged everyone for...

Before I fell under the spell of Fitzwilliam Darcy, I was an avid admirer of C S Forrester's Horatio Hornblower. Still am, if the truth...

Do you wonder about the husbands in Jane Austen's books? Tanya van Hasselt, my fellow-author and member of our writing group ninevoices,...

Some years ago I was looking for an occasional chair since, when my writing group (ninevoices.wordpress.com) meets at my home, I need an...

It is tempting to dream of being magically transported into the past. Not, of course, to be Anne Boleyn, kneeling on the scaffold...

I first read The Daughter of Time as a teenager and it fueled a lifelong fascination with history and an interest in Shakespeare's...

In the spring of 2015 I wrote the following post in my writing group's blog (ninevoices.wordpress.com) and the sad demise of Hilary...

'At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring. Inman's eyes and the long wound at his neck drew them, and the sound of their...

The Richard III Society commissioned Caroline Wilkinson, Professor of Craniofacial Identification at the University of Dundee, to...

When an interrupted burglary ends with the thief being pursued across an Edinburgh golf course and his ankle-breaking collapse on top of...

For Christmas I bought my husband a book about a woman who buys a bird and attempts to train it. Not my kind of thing. I'm drawn to books...

You are at the kitchen table, drooping over yet another rejected story. In her basket Ruby, the cocker spaniel, looks expectant, head...

For Christmas my lovely husband ordered a personalised jigsaw from Wentworth Puzzles. Who needs Mr Darcy...?

There are books that you want to read a second time and Jung Chang's Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China is one. I read the story soon...

I have written before about my enjoyment of good crime fiction, which I find an excellent change of pace from historical novels and...

From time to time I like to include articles about books by writers other than myself, and the following is a piece by Tanya van Hasselt,...

Before reading this book I was already aware that Cecily Neville - granddaughter of John of Gaunt and the mistress who subsequently...

I am delighted to welcome one of my periodic guest contributors, writing here about how she succeeded in having her debut novel...

Short story competitions keep many writers going. Less of a commitment than a novel and good practice for our craft, they offer the hope...