I love to include real events in my stories, and since the action revolves around a newspaper and its publisher I needed a couple of doozies to be worthy of the attention of the reporters in my novel A Note of Scandal. So imagine my delight, when reading about ships-of-the-line and other nautical footnotes, I [...]
Olivia, my heroine in A Note of Scandal, is a high-born lady (daughter of a marquess), so you’d think she had it made. But what she longs to do – write music and perform it – was considered déclassé, and her parents feel so strongly about it she would never even think to do it. [...]
You might wonder at the idea of a newspaper publisher being the hero of a regency-set novel, but once I learned of John Walter II and what he did, I knew I had to at least try to tell the story. Newspapers in the 1700s and early 1800s practiced a form of “advocacy journalism,” a [...]
Came across this today while doing unrelated research: From the London Times, 7 January 1809, page 3 ACKERMANN’S Repository of Arts, &c. which has just appeared, has adopted a novelty, we are surprised not to have been long since thought of, that of making a periodical publication the vehicle to distribute patterns of different articles [...]
As part of my prep for National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo.org), which starts next week (eek!), I’m reading through issues of the London Times from 1808. My story this time will be that of a British journalist sent to Spain to cover the start of the campaign there against the French. Amongst the reports on [...]
A cartoon circa 1819 depicts the effects of policies such as the Gag Acts and the Six Acts as the shackling and gagging of British freedoms. The “common man” cannot speak ill of the government under pain of death and cannot rise because of the burden of taxation. In the background John Bull’s shop is [...]
I am busy, but just stumbled on the first news stories on the Saville report, which exonerates the protesters during the Bloody Sunday “riot,” after decades of decrying them. I want to read more on it later, but this item just screamed out at me: Reported in The Guardian, “Bloody Sunday: the Saville report live”: [...]
From my research-pile, a snippet of one of the snarky songs of the late Regency period: WHEN full sedition’s stalking through the land, It then behoves each patriotic band Of Noble Minded Yeomen Cavaliers; To sally forth and rush upon the mob, And execute the Magisterial Job Of cutting off the Ragamuffin’s ears. HOW valiantly [...]
For a peek into the life and past of famed neuroscientist Eric Kandel, check out the new documentary “In Search of Memory” (which also happens to be the name of his well-regarded memoir). Here in Chicago, it’s playing through the week of Neuroscience 2009, the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, at the Facets Cinémathèque in [...]
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November is National Novel Writing Month! More at nanowrimo.org
