Blog
Imagining Eglantyne
Coming face to face with Eglantyne… when a play is inspired by my biography of Eglantyne Jebb, ‘The Woman Who Saved the Children’…
28 July 2015
Fighting Cocks and Showcased Skeletons, or Respect in Retrospect
Sometimes it is the dialogue we have with history itself that is as important as the facts and artefacts of the past…
28 June 2015
Plotting the Second World War
Doreen told me how she had plotted the Second World War. Not in an evil god-of-destruction way, but as a WAAF processing data about aircraft movement and plotting the changing positions on a map.
28 May 2015
Sapper Smith’s Gallipoli Dairy
His 1915 photo was yellowed from age after being nailed on a wall, but his medals never saw the light of day…
Sapper Smith’s Gallipoli diary provides a very human account of that terrible engagement.
28 April 2015
Women Making Waves
History is being made on the Thames this month…
28 March 2015
All About Ida
Since Ida won its Oscar I have been asked several times whether I think it is an ‘anti-Polish’ film. I do not…
28 February 2015
Memory and Humanity: Dame Stephanie Shirley
Each child had a luggage label around their neck, as if they were lost luggage, ‘which in a sense we were’, she says…
28 January 2015
Blue Plaque-tastic!
Blue plaques are street signposts that operate in another dimension. Arrows through time, cut them at any moment and the writing tells you what to recall…
29 December 2014
Lest We Forget
… Perhaps writing biographies has its similarities with Harry’s kind of art, in seeking to capture and present a picture of their subject that is more than skin deep?
21 November 2014
Finding truths in Facts and Fictions
A good biography will reveal why people acted as they did, how they felt and what they believed, and ‘the truth’ – or perhaps I should say ‘the many truths’ – of someone, must be found in both the facts and the fictions of their lives.
27 October 2014
Hiding and Seeking
It turns out that manuscripts also have lives of their own, with hidden stories, strategic translations and freshly edited republications and, as with people, it is only a matter of judgement which versions are the most authentic, which voice most true, and which should be remembered or retold…
1 October 2014
Women of the Warsaw Uprising
A moment later incendiaries started to fall. ‘At that point I realized I was going to die’ Hanna told me, adding quietly, ‘I was a bit afraid, but not much’…
29 September 2014
Introducing Hide and Seek
Xan again speaks his mind freely, vividly expressing his not-uncritical love for the place and people of Crete, as well as the fierce anger he felt at much of the conduct of the war.
28 August 2014
A Comic Strip War
‘It’s about the people that I love, that I loved at the time’ Sandy says simply…
28 July 2014
D Day + some
Paddy Ashdown describes Christine as ‘beguilingly beautiful, extraordinarily courageous and enthusiastically promiscuous’.
She was also a brilliantly effective special agent…
Secrets of the Cigar Box
My grandmother proudly preserved her civil service medal and… her beautiful long hair. It is only the two things taken together that start to hint at the woman behind them…
28 May 2014
Eglantyne Jebb, The Woman Who Saved the Children
Ninety-five years ago this month, in May 1919, a remarkable woman called Eglantyne Jebb, and her sister, Dorothy Buxton, changed the world…
23 May 2014
Grandfathers at War
A square of newspaper gummed to some glass, and some stamps gummed into an album. Two little boys on the opposite sides of First World War were collecting keepsakes while trying to make sense of the conflict around them…
28 April 2014
Singing History
‘It is very difficult to make a film about Auschwitz’, Kazik, now in his 90s, told Katy. ‘But this music video, through the use of the symbols and artwork and music, is bringing something new to the world.’
24 January 2014
Joyeux Noel
‘The Germans were quite friendly with us’ Lance Corporal Cooper of the 2nd Northampton’s wrote home. ‘They even came over to our trenches and gave us cigars and cigarettes and chocolate…
28 November 2013