Authors Electric

The more I write about history, the more I love it. Considering my school tried everything they knew to make me hate the subject, I consider myself extremely lucky that I got there in the end. Kings and queens meant nothing to me until a history lecturer at University – the great and sainted Ian Kershaw – told me that William the Conqueror fell off his horse and burst. Now that for me, is a proper kingly way to die. The real beauty, and frustration, of history is that an extraordinary amount of it is guesswork. That's why I've always been wary of biography. Somebody spends many years examining everything recorded about a certain personage, and is confident at the end of all that they have drawn a perfect picture. Sadly, that is balderdash. I don't even know myself why I do most things that I do, and looking back on them, the problem just gets murkier. Take Nelson. One of Britain's most authentic heroes, still revered, still cited in any naval argument. Then ta...

Another of the beauties of being a writer, is the way things lurk. For years, sometimes. Everything rolls along as normal, stories, novels, plays come and go, and some become pretty dormant, just lie there in the great outside, ignored and (maybe) festering. Then comes a communication, let’s say on Facebook. Facebook, for those of you who haven’t heard of it (!), is a way of keeping in touch with the wider reality. Pictures of Prime ministers and pigs, that sort of thing. Jokes about blondes and mirrors that you somehow feel you have no right to laugh at. Accounts of the latest NRA polemic proving that 3,000 gun deaths a year is an argument for arming babies in their prams. About four months ago a man called Aneel Ahmad sent me a private FB message saying he’d always been a big fan of my early kids’ book My Mate Shofiq. He was a film-maker, and could we talk? At the very least he wanted me to sign his copy. I wasn’t playing hard to get, but I’m usually too busy to efficie...