Reviewed by Stephanie Williams I must have been about thirteen when my imagination was first captured by Akhenaten, the legendary pharaoh who brought the revolutionary idea of one god to Egypt in the fourteenth century BCE.   His wife, rumoured to be his sister, was even more romantic:  the beautiful, powerful and mysterious Nefertiti.   Bust of Nefertiti, Nofretete…
 Twelve or so years ago, I started a creative writing class in Cheddar, where I live. I tried out several venues, one of which was a house owned by the Parish Council, named Hannah More Cottage. It’s a pleasant looking old cottage with whitewashed walls, small windows and a pretty garden: the roof used to…
Inside Harrogate Library, at the start of March,a new display was put up, decorated with small flags and badges, and arranged by the Local Studies group. As I studied the labels, printed images and photocopied extracts, the story seemed like a glimpse an exciting Edwardian detective adventure. Secret meetings? Foreign infiltrators? Concealed figures hurrying across…
Some years ago the BBC ran an advert for the 6 Nations Rugby tournament which was pulled following some complaints, and then proceeded to go viral! The punchline was –  ‘It’s not who you want to win, but who you want to lose.’  No prizes for guessing the answers the Scots, Irish and…
Last Christmas I brought my Mum one of those ancestry DNA kits with the hope that it would reveal hitherto unknown mysteries about her/my lineage and thus provide me with a ready-made topic for a History Girls post.Two months later when the results pinged into her inbox it is fair to say my Mum was…
 Anne Boleyn – home-wrecker, whore, wicked stepmother, scheming bitch, witch, the woman responsible for encouraging the early years of the English reformation – or simply a woman whose fate was determined by the love or hate of a King?   About the author: Wendy J. Dunn is an Australian writer obsessed by Tudor History. She…
The life of Greta Garbo, the Swedish-American actress, is a rags to riches story. Born in Stockholm in 1905 as Greta Gustafsson, she earned her living as a ‘lather girl’ in a barber shop before becoming a fashion model, and then an accomplished actress who graduated from the Royal Dramatic Training Academy. ‘Discovered’ in Sweden…
I love birds and have lived within chirping distance of Blackfriars Bridge for two decades. Yet I only quite recently realized that it’s a twitcher’s paradise. From the road, you’d never suspect it. You have to lean over the parapet to see the full, strange spectacle. Each column, east and west, is adorned with life-size…
 I first read The Whalebone Theatre a couple of years ago. Lots of people had enjoyed it, and I did too, but it probably suffered a bit from something akin to ‘tall poppy syndrome’: do you know what I mean? It’s when you hear so many good things about a book/film/place that when you…
 This is the cover of my ninth novel, When I Was, which has just been published by Barbican Press.  I wrote this novel about growing up in London in the 1950s from memory. Strangely, I found myself unable to write about myself in the first person, although I’ve written about other people – the artists Richard…
