I’ve been reading The Holyhead Road: The Mail Coach Road to Dublin by Charles G Harper. It’s a whopping two-volume work, with each volume being around 300 pages. Harper (1863-1943) was a prolific author, illustrator and journalist, and a keen walker and cyclist. His other books include The Brighton Road, The Portsmouth Road, The Norwich Road and many others in the same vein, as well as books about ghosts, highwaymen, motoring and smuggling. A keen cyclist You might think that having to wade through two volumes of a book entitled The Holyhead Road: The Mail Coach Road to Dublin shows just how much a historical novelist is prepared to suffer for the sake of research. I thought so myself before I started reading the books. In fact, they turned out to be strangely entertaining. Reading Harper is like being in the company of some old-fashioned curmudgeon who likes nothing better than having a good swipe at the world and its oddities. Writing of a statue of Prince Albert in Wolverhampton, f