Authors Electric

The Sterkarm Handshake     How did you get the idea for the Sterkarms?  I had no idea of writing anything remotely like it. Then I went on a walking holiday in the Scottish Borders. The guides kept saying, 'This is an old Reiver's trail,' or pointing to a tower and saying, 'That's an old Reiver's tower.' I was intrigued and bought George MacDonald Fraser's book, THE STEEL BONNETS , read it, and was absolutely fascinated. I got that feeling - 'I want to write about these people!'  The obvious thing was to write an historical novel, set in the reivers' time, but my gut-feeling said no to that. I felt that the present day had to be in the book too. So I played about with various ways of transferring characters from one time to another - the knock on the head and waking up in another century, the mystical time-slip, the dream. None of these ideas satisfied me. They all seemed too fussy, and all would involve the ...

  The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman Courtesy Paul Harrison, Wikimedia Here's a quiz for you. All the questions have the same answer. These days most of us sleep on a bed that's raised up on legs, instead of a mattress on the floor. Why? And why do we sit on chairs with long legs rather than on the floor or on a low bench or stool? The first houses, no matter where they were built, had much the same plan: a large room where everyone worked, chatted, cooked, ate and slept around a central fire. This form of dwelling lasted for thousands of years. Then, fairly recently, houses were divided up into many small rooms. Why did this change happen? And why are many people now returning to 'open-plan living' with large, undivided spaces combining kitchen and living-room? Consider your cooking pots. Why are they made of iron instead of copper or brass and why do they have flat bottoms? Why don't they stand up on their own little legs any more, or hang from a hook, and...