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...

I went to a charity folk festival last week (as Teresa May might say, I'm not making this up) but not, for once, to play slow Irish airs on my whistle. I donated my "services" as a children's author to help raise funds to save the Barlow Memorial Institute in the Lancashire village of Edgworth from the cuts. It's Cameron's Pig Society, innit? Good fun it was, too - worth every penny that I didn't get. The assembled children were suitably shocked and delighted by the adventures of Wagstaffe the Wind-up Boy, and some of their parents were suitably horrified by some of its content, as well as Roy Bentley' s wonderfully gruesome pictures. {Above and below you can see Carl Grose as Waggie in Kneehigh Theatre's lovely version. I'd have done captions, but computer says no, due to my technical incompetence, no doubt.} Anyway, the Edgworth folk festival started with a specially written poem, and - inevitably - I was featured in it as a woman. An...