Thursday
May092013

Peter Duck outwits the weather fairy

This wasn't the title Yachting Monthly gave my account of our 2012 cruise to the Veersemeer - a week that makes me feel happy everytime I think back. YM used a mix of my photos, one each from Bertie and Archie and some 'proper' ones taken a few weeks later by Bob Aylott.  Click here to read

Sunday
Apr282013

Reviews

The Salt-Stained Book got a lovely write-up from bookseller Catherine Hawley on her blog Juxtabook. The entire Strong Winds Trilogy was reviewed by Chris Brown, reviews editor of the School Librarian and, as if all that were not enough, History Today ran a thorough and appreciative review of Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory by Melbourne based critic Fiona Gruber. 

Monday
Mar182013

Arcadia in the East

The month of March means the Essex Book Festival. Splendid choice of events across the county, mainly in libraries. I had a happy afternoon in a cosy corner of Epping Library last week talking about Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory. Such a good audience - I wanted to go on for ever!  Wrote my Authors Electric March blog after a trip to Jaywick where literary culture fights the good fight from a restored Martello Tower. http://authorselectric.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/arcadia-on-east-coast-of-england-by.html?spref=fb

Monday
Feb252013

Ninety well-chosen words

in The Mail on Sunday Feb 24th 2013

"Herbert Allingham was one of Britain's most prolific and popular authors a century ago but you will never have heard of him. The reason is that he wrote stories anonymously for the weekly magazines so common in his day and none was ever reprinted in book form. He would have been forgotten had his daughters, one of whom was the author Margery Allingham, not preserved his work. Julia Jones has sifted through this archive and succeeded brilliantly in bringing to life both Allingham and the literary form in which he excelled."

****

THANK YOU SIMON SHAW

Saturday
Feb092013

Margery Allingham - after the Afterword

 

This month's blog for Authors Electric gave me the opportunity to think again (yet again) about the relationship between Margery's life and her fiction - specifically between The China Governess and the existence of Tom Carter

Read it here