One of Casanova’s famous anecdotes dates to his time in Turin, where a milliner was fatally obsessed with her lover, the Comte de la Perouse...

When does history begin? When does the present slide through a looking glass and emerge as ‘history’? Is yesterday ‘history’? When I was in ...

Deborah Swift My fourth book in the Giulia Tofana series, The Cameo Keeper, focuses on medicine and healing in the 17th Century, a time of ...

Researching for my second book in the 'Soldier Spy' trilogy, it’s been quite a journey to learn about the extent of spying, on both sides,...

An engrossing Victorian Scotland Saga (Silver Sampler Series Book 3)

Following the bumper box office success of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey this summer, online searches for ‘Learn Ancient Greek’ have soared a...

Brehon Bee Laws What would happen if bees from your hive swarmed and then settled in a neighbour’s tree, or if you were stung badly by one...

Only a daughter of two worlds can save England’s future.

Renaissance Venice   Travellers who visited in Venice in the 15 th, 16 th and 17 th century never failed to marvel at the number of courte...

For more than four hundred years, domestic manuals have done far more than offer women recipes and guidelines for running a household. The...

I’m going on holiday very early tomorrow morning, and tonight we have sixteen people coming for supper and some music. In retrospect, this m...

St. Petersburg 1908-1917

A crown won in the eye of a storm. A queen who refuses to be broken…

Like many of us, I grew up in a time of protest. In Canada, we marched against the war in Vietnam (I carried a placard with the catchy sloga...

The Ancient Egyptians worshipped a pantheon of well over 1,400 gods and goddesses – possibly as many as 2,000.   Each deity was believed to ...

I’m thinking about historical sources. Not just any historical sources, but ones that give us access to everyday lives. There are sources...

Jul 22, 2026 |

Could a house could be unlucky?  I'm not sure I believe in such things, but something prickled the back of my neck when I was researching th...

Minoan Textiles   For millennia, women in particular sat together, spinning, weaving and sewing, but because textiles are perishable...

A day out in Edinburgh recently and walking through the Cowgate, I passed this sign. Few figures in sixteenth-century Scotland aroused str...