Authors Electric

  Why has a wider knowledge become so narrow? Every time I teach a new literary text to a student, I am excited to share the context of its historical period with them. Understanding the social and historical background to a text can help to bring it to life, illustrating what motivated the author, what they rebelled against or were shaped by, whether they realised it or not. It is crucially important when studying older texts, like Shakespeare or Dickens, which can seem so remote from the lives of young people today, but it is also important to remember that events which happened in the 1980’s and 90’s might as well be medieval to a 15-year-old. Studying Willy Russell’s  Blood Brothers   requires an understanding of Thatcherism and the politics that shaped the decade in which she presided over No. 10. Knowing the background not only enriches understanding, but it also helps to present the authors as real people with real lives. Furthermore, it is part of the curriculum i...

  Monday evening presented me with the perfect reason for buying more notebooks. As homeschooling my children kept me away from shops, I am still looking for some wonderful ones, although I might have to check my shelf to see if any of my ten spare notebooks will do. They’re spare for a reason, of course, so they might be too nice to be actually used... I have been part of a wonderful group of History Writers for a while, even though my one slightly historical book is a time travelling Viking novella. As soon as I wrote it, just for fun, I realised how interesting the Viking Era was and how interesting research is. Viking Ferry isn’t particularly historically accurate, but as soon as I was done, I started thinking of a Viking series. We live in an interesting house, in a wonderful village. The house was built in 1817, and looking around the village, I wondered what kind of things could have gone wrong in the past. I always wanted to write a murder mystery, so I started looking ...