Soon after embarking on my novel about British women pilots in world war two, I began to consider adding a Polish strand to the story and as part of my resea...

In the past few years, amateur paedophile hunters have rarely been far from the headlines of Britain’s tabloid newspapers. ‘The nation is in the grip of an e...

Writing a work of fiction requires different muscles to writing history. The historian’s impulse is to prove an argument by inclusion of evidence, details, i...

One night in 1851, as Hannah Cullwick looked into an open fire, she saw in the flames ‘a nice manly face with a moustache’ and knew that this was her true lo...

Where does a novel come from? I can trace my first thoughts about the story that would become The Conviction of Cora Burns with a Google search for the phras...

Following the 1834 Poor Law and the extension of poverty relief by local Unions of parishes, the old workhouse in the centre of Birmingham became increasingl...

My journey started with Sir Francis Galton, the Victorian polymath who coined the phrase 'nature versus nurture' and provided the blueprint for Thomas Jerwoo...

by Carolyn Kirby From the study where I do my writing, I have a distant view of the Berkshire Downs and at the centre of that view, beside the Thames, is the...