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A deeply historical, but fictional, Somers Town 21 Aug 2013 | 03:11 am
First published on Blogcritics As a resident of the central London district of Somers Town, which I often describe as the “last poor area community left in central London”, when I heard that there wa...
A wander around the wilds of Britain 18 Aug 2013 | 02:24 am
I’ve been reading The Wild Places by Robert MacFarlane, and learning a lot. Some words: Holloway (from the Anglo-Saxon hola-wed, a sunken road. Always at least 300 years old, worn down by the traffi...
How does a hedgehog give birth? 15 Aug 2013 | 08:28 pm
Originally published on Blogcritics How does a hedgehog give birth, given that the babies are born already with spines? The kind of question that mightn’t regularly pop into your head, but certain on...
Pterosaurs – forget practically everything you were ever told 15 Jul 2013 | 01:41 am
A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics I last really looked at Pterosaurs some 30 years ago, when as a fossil-obsessed young teen, I haunted the paleontology section of the Australian M...
Medieval dining – an unusual perspective on history 11 Jul 2013 | 03:46 am
A shorter version was originally published on Blogcritics. Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition is a collection of academic monographs, arising from a diet research group that came to recogni...
Recent Reading: Women and The People: Authority, Authorship and the Radical Tradition in Nineteenth-Century England by Helen Rogers 21 Jun 2013 | 03:41 am
You meet some fascinating women in the pages of Helen Roger’s Women and the People. The whole theoretical discussion left me a bit cold – not really my period or area, but I really enjoyed the charact...
Mary Beard’s always worth reading… 13 May 2013 | 03:17 am
A shorter version was originally published on Blogcritics Mary Beard is pretty well public intellectual of the year, after her spirited performance on Question Time, and strong-minded reaction to the ...
Kentish pleasures 6 May 2013 | 08:09 pm
After elections, an afternoon off – a very pleasant stroll in Kent from Eynsford to Shoreham – yes the weather helped… I was following a 1998 guide to walks around London, but luckily the paths were s...
Those rebellious English … 22 Apr 2013 | 01:58 am
From A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066-1649 by David Rollison “The institutionalisation, in the 14th century, of Sir Thomas Smith’s first and se...
The Levellers and the Agreements of the People 22 Apr 2013 | 01:38 am
In a minorly curious coincidence, this week’s Radio Four’s In Our Time was on the Putney debates, just as I finished reading The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis o...
