“Run from what’s comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I’ll be mad.”
I’ll start this with an article from Brill.com… Truth and Fiction in A. I. Sulakadzev’s Chronograph of the Marriages of Tsar Ivan Vasil’evich in Canadian-American Slavic Studies Author: Russell E. Martin Online Publication Date: 01 Jan 2013 Volume/Issue: Volume 47: Issue 4 Article Type: Research Article Restricted Access Abstract/Excerpt Few sources have exerted more influence on the […]
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A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words. From the Nuremberg Chronicle: BOOK BURNING
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I have had this book – How to Read a Church by Richard Taylor – forever and a day. No idea why but…! On the first page he says: “As we will see, early Christians did not meet in buildings dedicated to worship, but in common meeting places or one another’s homes. The word ‘church’ […]
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I’m still on the Dorothy Dunnett vibe. Out of the six Lymond Chronicles, Pawn in Frankincense is my favourite. It’s partly why I know a bit about the Ottoman Empire and Constantinople. Lymond is causing havoc around the Mediterranean, especially in the court of Suleiman the Magnificent and his powerful wife, Roxelana. I was delighted […]
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Respect is not a word I use lightly, or very often but the one-and-only-historical-fiction writer that I give Respect to is Dorothy Dunnett. If you don’t know her vast body of work, then this will mean nothing. If you do – you will not like what I’m about to say! What did DD actually know? […]
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Oh, what a tangled web we weave. When first we practise to deceive! Walter Scott. 1808 This post is subtitled – When England “Discovered” Russia. I’ve been reading a thesis on Giles Fletcher the Elder. I like theses because they are written by people who are in-with-the-in-crowd and who have access to more arcane sources […]
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All my life I wanted a Mentor. Someone to guide, to inspire, to believe in me. From my late teens I had such a person but I didn’t know it. Because – being me, myself, I – I knew instinctively that I would never acknowledge that loving faith and guidance. Leslie Kenton.. I devoured all […]
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Bizarreness Alert: (Oh – How I love making up words!) This book has been on my mind for several days now. You might say it is haunting me (?) Many (mumble) years ago a cherished and beautiful friend recommended it. And I adore everything about the story but…. It’s not so much the story that […]
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The Secret Rooms by Catherine Bailey. “At 6 am on 21 April 1940 John the 9th Duke of Rutland, and one of Britain’s wealthiest men, ended his days, virtually alone, lying on a makeshift bed in a dank cramped suite of rooms in the servants’ quarters of his own home, Belvoir Castle, in Leicestershire. For […]
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Below is a book about 12th Century mechanical devices. It’s interesting and lovely on many levels but I’m finding the clocks very confusing. Now I may have misread/misunderstood but sometimes it talks about a 24 hour day. Then a bit later it talks about the 14 and a half hours of the longest day – […]
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I bought this book over twenty years ago. On a whim, From a secondhand bookshop. I read it and then parked it…one book amongst many. Then three or so years ago Serious Research began on my next magnificent, blockbusting novel Ravens of Dinefwr (OK. Stop laughing. A girl can dream!) My story includes Robert Curthose, […]
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Hernando Colón or as we probably know him better – Ferdinand Columbus was the son of Christopher Columbus of 1492 fame. He supposedly lived between 1488 and 1539 and known to most only through his famous father, But Hernando was also a fanatical book collector who built up an enormous library. The mainstream story is: For […]
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Hidden History Research 