Blog
“A huge, heavy galleon of white Portland stone…”
“…anchored among the red-brick Queen Anne houses of the weavers.” So John Betjeman described Christ Church, Spitalfields, in The Collins Guide to English Parish Churches. The Grade I listed church was built following an Act of Parliament in 1711, which legislated for...
“When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it…”
I have my criticisms of my mother, and in many ways she was an abomination, but she did make sure I learnt to swim, and – more unusually – to ride. My sister and I were horse fanatics. Our riding lessons involved a long, meandering bus ride through the lanes of...
Joe Robinette Biden: Hey Joe, is that a Huguenot name there?
Joe Biden’s middle name, Robinette, is enough to make any Huguenot researcher’s ears twitch; and, quick as a flash on his victory, Facebook group Huguenot Heritage claimed him. Biden himself has been self-effacing about his ancestry: “It’s my grandmother Biden’s...
Slavery, statuary and Huguenot villainry
Thanks to Black Lives Matter and the toppling of a Bristol statue, I’ve just found out about the part a number of Huguenots played in the transatlantic slave trade. All that Bible reading did such Huguenots no good when it came to the lives of stolen Africans. We all...
In the secret places of the heart: The Mirror And The Light
It was comforting to slide back into the familiar mind of Thomas Cromwell as imagined by Hilary Mantel. If you haven’t tackled Mantel’s Tudor trilogy, it’s a very apt project for the lockdown – three enormous tomes, all of them quite hard work, all worth the effort....
The other side of the tracks
Sarah is 80 this year. She idolised my mum who, admittedly, was good with small children not her own. In any case, this was in the years when my mum was a Sunday School teacher and must have had child-amusing tricks up her sleeve. Sarah is one of my long-lost cousins...
For God’s sake: the things they do to you
Biographer Monique Goodliffe reviews the novel “Women Talking” by Miriam Toews in an important guest blog on fundamentalism and the treatment of women. In a remote part of Bolivia, many girls and women woke up in the morning...
Making musical clocks in Blackfriars
A Protestant-made timepiece was chosen by historian Neil MacGregor to be one of twenty British Museum objects which best illustrate Shakespeare’s life and the background for his plays. The rare musical clock, created by highly-skilled Flemish Protestant refugee...
Shut out from a mystery: Guest Blog reviewing “Educated” by Tara Westover
Biographer Monique Goodliffe has contributed a review of Tara Westover’s stunning memoir “Educated”:
When I was little, I lived at an Anglican mission in the high veld in South Africa. My parents, both doctors, worked at the hospital there. We …
Cancer ward
I’ve been sitting in a cancer ward at the Royal Marsden Hospital, desperately relying on a Tudor detective novel to distract me. Nurses are putting cancer drugs into my child and it’s almost impossible to bear. One of them catches me glaring at her. “Everything OK?”...
Neat freaks find my CD-Rom
I just had the declutterers in. It’s sheer extravagance, but when you’ve still got the debris from your father’s estate to weed out, ten years after his death, probably justified. Maybe in 2008 I believed I might still keep him – deny death - by holding on to every...
Half-Hanged Mary and The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood dedicated her novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” to Mary Webster – “Half-Hanged Mary”. Webster was hanged from a tree for witchcraft in 17th century Puritan New England, yet – remarkably – survived overnight, was cut down, and subsequently lived on for...