I’ve just read Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade. I loved this book. It’s about a group of women whose lives and work I find really inspiring though I don’t know much about some of them, and nothing at all about one (HD). The other women are Dorothy L Sayers (I’m a huge fan), Virginia Woolf, Eileen Power and Jane Ellen Harrison. I’m moved and encouraged by their passion for and dedication to their work. I love the way they just kept going through all the discouragements and disappointments. I’m fascinated by their lives between the wars. I’m infuriated by the attitudes they faced – which still ring oh-too-true today. I eagerly devour these stories of women who were not just seeking but creating their own space. Of course, space here doesn’t just mean their physical space, but how and where they chose to live is a huge part of it. Hence the book’s brilliant focus on place, on a place: Mecklenburgh Square in London. The book gives a vivi...

When I was in London a few days ago I spent an enjoyable afternoon strolling around the Houses of Parliament and viewing the statues of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union, and suffragist Millicent Garratt Fawcett, leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Standing in the middle of Parliament Square on a cold, gloomy day with traffic going about its business, tourists going about their pleasure, and office workers going about their lunch, it was sobering to think of all the dreadful scenes that had taken place there just over a hundred years ago. When I shut my eyes many horribly familiar images rose up in my imagination. Of women attempting to deliver petitions to the House of Commons being set upon by police and thugs, kicked, knocked to the ground, and in some cases sexually assaulted. Of women having their clothes torn and their hair pulled out. Of women arrested, including Mrs Pankhurst herself. A suffra...

In The Butcher’s Block , the second full-length Dan Foster Mystery, Dan is working undercover in Southwark in a case that sees him crossing paths with body snatchers, blood-thirsty revolutionaries, French agents and British spies. In the eighteenth century Southwark was a smelly, noisy, dirty place, crammed with shipping and its associated wharves and warehouses handling coal, timber, pipe clay, corn and a myriad other goods. Many of its industries were not the sort we’d like to live next door to, such as slaughter houses, leather tanning, brewing, soap and candle making. There were workshops and factories producing hats, glue, sugar, needles, watches, guns and coaches. There were flour mills, distilleries, and breweries such as that owned by Henry Thrale, husband of writer and diarist Esther Thrale. There were markets at Borough and St George’s Market, and men and women on the streets selling food, drink, ballads, ribbons, flowers, bread, and other goods. There were beef ...