Julia Prima , Alison Morton (Pulcheria Press, 2022)   Alison Morton is the inventor of Roma Nova, a small but influential state (about the size of Luxembourg) founded in AD395 by 400 Romans led by Senator Apulius and his daughters. Apulius, his daughters and the people who followed him had seceded from the Roman Empire when their freedom to worship Rome’s traditional, pagan gods was obliterated by the new official religion of Rome, Christianity. Alison Morton has written nine thrillers about modern-day Roma Nova, which has developed over the centuries into a state which has retained many Roman republican qualities – the Roman gods are still worshipped – but where women have come to wield real political and social power.  It's a fascinating and well-developed alternative history, and in Julia Prima Alison Morton takes the reader back to the beginning and gives us the story of Apulius and his wife, Julia. From the minute they set eyes on one another it’s a tale of stormy pass...

My postcard collection includes this picture of Fanny Fields, a music hall star whose song The Suffragette was one of many music-hall references to the militant suffrage campaign of the 1900s. Fanny Fields found fame playing an American-Dutch girl with a lager-swilling fiancé called Schultz. She entertained her audiences with songs, clog dances, and comic patter. She was one of the most popular stars of her day, and perhaps nowhere was she more loved than in Bristol.  Happy Fanny Fields She was born Fanny Furman in New York on 15 September 1880, and started performing in Vaudeville at the age of thirteen. According to her own account, she went on the stage to help refill the family’s coffers after her parents’ fruit importing business failed. Her brother, who had been an actor, taught her to dance, and her brother-in-law, Joseph Fields, was an actor and encouraged her talent for mimicry. After a year in variety, she spent five years touring with various companies, and then joine...