Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

 The past is another country. and it can take a great deal of research and imaginative effort to recreate its multilayered richness of sights, sounds, smells, textures and tastes. Visiting the  Chiltern Open Air Museum a few years ago I f...

 Aged nine and passionate about Narnia, I wrote a set of my own stories about that magical country, and that far-off labour of love resulted in the publication this year of my book 'Spare Oom'. (So great is the power of childhood reading to reve...

In ‘A Book of Folk-Lore’ (1913) the Devon folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould recounts three instances in which he and members of his family ‘saw’ pixies or dwarfs. Here is what he says: In the year 1838, when I was a small boy of four years old,...

 In Thomas Gray's beautiful  'Elegy Written in a County Churchyard', he muses over the unknown, uncelebrated talent of the humble country people who lie buried there:Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast     &...

This post first appeared on The History Girls blog in 2015, all of six years ago! Judging by the apple blossom, the spring weather must have been warmer that year: today the blossom's only half out. And owing to lockdown, I doubt there were any crowd...

When we were children my brother and I would sometimes bemoan our bad luck in never having any adventures. We were big fans of Enid Blyton, in whose books groups of children from nice safe middle-class backgrounds not very dissimilar to our own got i...

  At the end of this month my book about Narnia will be published – 'From Spare Oom to War Drobe', Darton Longman and Todd, 29th April 2021, £16.99: https://bit.ly/3wHaOYw – and available from all good book retailers. The map on the cover i...