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...

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...

I’ve always been interested in the “after life” of the suffrage campaigners in Britain – what they did after the campaign for the vote – especially since so many histories about them stop at the point when their involvement in the campaign came to an end. Because women’s war work during the First World War is associated with (and often cited as a direct cause of) the eventual enfranchisement of British women, these accounts often extend into the war, and sometimes into the Second World War. Thus we hear of women working in munitions, medicine or quasi-military organisations. We might also hear that they joined other women’s organisations, such as the Suffragette Fellowship or the Six Point Group. Often, though, you’d think that most women suffrage campaigners’ lives came to an end when the franchise campaign ended. Unless, of course, they were well known, in which case their lives are better documented. So it was very exciting to discover evidence of one suffragette’s “after life” wh...

I recently read A C Grayling’s biography The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt (2000). It’s the fascinating story of a fascinating man, elegantly written and immensely readable. Hazlitt was an essayist, arts critic, and a life-long radical. Unlike the friends of his youth, Coleridge and Wordsworth, he never abandoned his radical politics. He was devastated by the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte and the subsequent restoration of European monarchies. He was an independent thinker, who wrote in an intensely personal and original style. Hazlitt was also a philanderer, a man who had numerous infatuations and affairs, and who frequently visited prostitutes. In one bizarre and rather obscure incident in the Lake District, he is said to have “spanked” a local girl. Mmm. I think the word the biographer is struggling for is “assaulted”. According to Grayling, Hazlitt did this because she must have been “teasing him, or leading him on and then denying him”. Hazlitt later d...