Category: History and Research

  • What I’ve Been Reading

    I can’t believe I haven’t done a reading update since July! I have been reading, I just haven’t had time to talk much about it. As usual, I have put reviews of everything I’ve read on Goodreads, but here is a small selection of the best. First up, two books that I decided to read…

  • Barcelona Birthday Trip

    When my mum turned eighty it was during the pandemic, forcing us to postpone our planned girly trip to celebrate with my three sisters. We re-planned to combine the celebration with my ‘big’ pending sixtieth birthday, and had intended heading to the East Neuk of Fife. But though one of the sisters who lives ‘down…

  • Backlist Books – A Forbidden Liaison with Miss Grant

    At the start of my (still new!) TikTok journey, I decided to do a post about my favourite cover, which meant that I spent a happy hour or two going through my back list in my bookcases. After about sixty books and novellas, I’d forgotten a lot of them – in fact I couldn’t even…

  • A Tour of Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute

    I have been visiting the Isle of Bute all my life on family holidays, and as you’ll know if you follow this blog, I am still a regular visitor there to visit family. My latest trip coincided with the Glasgow Fair holiday, when traditionally hordes of Weegies go ‘Doon the Watter’ for a break –…

  • London – For Business, But Mostly Pleasure

    The paperback of Her Heart for a Compass, the first book I co-authored with Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, was released in May this year. To celebrate, Mills&Boon hosted a live Historical Book Club event at the News Building, so for the second time in the space of a few weeks I paid a visit…

  • Brighton Rocks!

    My first experiences of Brighton were literary, and though read around about the same time in my late teens, their depiction of the fashionable seaside resort on the South Coast were poles apart. Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock was set in the sleazy underworld of the town in the 1950s, a stark contrast to the Regency…

  • Coastal Walks

    Back in April this year, once I had finished with my cat-sitting for Simba, I finally got some time to spend with Peter, one of my oldest friends, at his home in Hythe near Folkstone (which is near Dover on the south coast). The sun shone blindingly every day of my visit. We share a…

  • Cat-Sitting, Chilling and Taking Stock

    For the last two years, before and after lockdown, I have been working full out with very little breaks between books. In February this year, Sarah Ferguson and I handed over our second book together (A Most Intriguing Lady, more on this soon), and I then jumped straight in to writing a Christmas novella which…

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