Books appear in many different formats, shapes, sizes and technologies. This autumn British Vogue: the Biography of an Icon will be available in three formats: the hardback version, the Kindle version and the audiobook. This last intrigues me. It is a combination of my words, an actor’s voice and a producer’s interpretation of both. And it is […]

For the first six months of 2024, I was busy and taken up with two projects. The first was the centenary celebration of the disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine on Mount Everest on 8 June 1924. The second was the completion of my biography of British Vogue which was in the final stages of proofs, […]

British Vogue: The Biography of an Icon Part 3 The Cover Story This blog is the story of the jacket of my Vogue biography. The name ‘jacket’ raised quizzical smiles in the archives at Vogue House when I mentioned it. The immediate response of the archivists was to imagine Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent or Dior, while I was […]

British Vogue: The Biography of an Icon Part 2 Editing and Production When I talk to students about editing, I see them roll their eyes and look away. ‘Editing,’ I say in my most enthusiastic voice, ‘is where the magic happens.’ This is usually greeted with a plaintive ‘but I hate re-reading what I’ve written.’  To […]

British Vogue: the Biography of an Icon Part 1: Research and Writing Once the lightbulb moment has faded and the idea for a book begins to take shape, there comes the biggest task of all: research. For this book it has been huge but at the same time contained. The subject matter limited the amount of […]

On Saturday 8 June 2024 over 600 people gathered at the Royal Geographical Society in London to mark the 100th anniversary of the disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine. Among the crowd were more than 30 members of the Mallory family, 8 Irvines and a good showing of Odells, Nortons, Somervells and Morshead (from the 1922 […]

It is wonderful to celebrate the amazing achievements of extraordinary women on International Women’s Day. I’m very pleased to have heard so many female composers featured on radio 3 this morning, for example. And the newspapers are full of impressive profiles of women who have defied the odds, challenged misogyny or battled against fearsome prejudice. […]

16 years ago, we decided to buy a dog. It would be a family pet but its owner, within the family, would be Richard. Tiggy was born in East Grinstead on 8 January 2007. She had a distinguished pedigree, beautiful markings and an enchanting black face. We picked her up when she was eight weeks […]

This is the eulogy I gave for my father, Peter, at the Service of Thanksgiving we held for him in St Mary’s Church at Acton on 3 March 2022. I do not normally write about my immediate family but several people have asked me for a copy of the words I spoke so I thought […]

Pedal to Paris 2021 Day One London to Dover 121.31 km (75.38 miles) 1,296m (4,252 feet) ascent 5.15 hours As we stood on the start line at Eltham Palace at 6:30 on a grey, chilly morning with mizzle, all the first-timers felt a sense of anxiety about whether we would make it to Paris at […]

The night before we left Eltham Palace on the first leg of the Pedal to Paris, I promised myself and the press team at the Royal British Legion that I would write a daily blog of the expedition. Naively I thought I would be able to get to the hotels and bash out an account […]

We’ve arrived at Eltham and are ready to leave for Paris tomorrow at 6:00am. From where I’m sitting now it all feels a bit overwhelming. Will we be able to cope with six hours a day in the saddle? Will we be the oldest cyclists? Probably not but up there with the others who have […]

Last August I finished the first draft of the manuscript that would become We Are The Legion: 100 Years of the Royal British Legion. Like the rest of the world, I had been locked up more or less since the middle of March and I was aching to have a project that would take me […]

I only met the magnificent Helen McCrory once, for an hour and a half, in a tiny room above a shop in Tottenham Court Road. But that meeting left an indelible impression on me and I will never forget the magic of her presence. I had been hired as the historical consultant on the film […]

I mentioned in a previous blog that one of the things that struck me about the Royal British Legion was the age of its membership around the time of its formation. Rather like the Women’s Institute when it was set up in 1915 with its members average age of 24 years old, the Legion’s profile […]

When the Duke of Edinburgh’s death was announced this morning, I found myself recalling a wonderful afternoon in Paris in 1992 when I had to show him around an exhibition. I was working for the Henry Moore Foundation at the time, and we were staging a huge show of his largest sculptures in the Jardins […]

Two months from now, on 15 May 2021, the Royal British Legion will celebrate its 100th anniversary. Born out of the ashes of the First World War, the Legion was the amalgamation of several ex-Services organisations, all fighting on behalf of those wounded, disabled, widowed or orphaned by war. Over the last century the Legion […]

Sandy aged 21 photographed for the Oxford University 1923 Blue Boat 96 years ago, today, 8th June 1924, my great uncle stepped into the pages of history. He was the nd’Irvine of the greatest mountaineering mystery of all times, the junior climbing partner of the great George Mallory. From the moment of their disappearance, somewhere […]

Today is Friday 8 May 2020, the 75th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe. Seventy-five years ago today the costliest war in history was finally drawing to a close, though its end would not come until 15 August 1945 when the Japanese Imperial Army surrendered unconditionally. Costliest in terms of lives – […]

Several people have asked me what Audrey Withers’ reaction to the current crisis would have been. I have thought about it a lot and it occurred to me that it might be interesting to compare 1940 and 2020. At the beginning of the Second World War the government closed down the country. It banned all […]

Now that Audrey is launched in Dressed for War she is public property. People have begun to contact me to tell me things about her which of course I wished I had known when I was writing the book. That always happens, though, so I have given up getting paranoid about missing out on every […]

There is a moment in a book’s life when it is no longer the personal, much-loved friend it was during research, writing and editing. This is when it goes to print and the powerful machine of publicity grinds into action. It might seem strange to express a book’s publication thus but it is something I […]

The build up to Remembrance Day always reminds me of the importance of memories. I’m talking here about national memories as much as personal ones. Two organisations most closely connected in the public’s imagination to memories in this context are the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, who I worked for part-time from 2005 to 2015 and […]

It is a very strange feeling when you hand over a proof of a book for the final time. This precious document that you have shared with an editor, a copy editor, a proof-reader and an indexer, is suddenly ready to be shared with others. There is a momentary feeling of loss that, for me […]

I was going to post this blog on 4 August after I had handed in the finished draft of my biography of Audrey Withers to my editor, Iain MacGregor, on 31 July, as per contract. However, on 25 April Iain asked whether I could bring the deadline forward by six weeks and deliver by mid-June. […]

My very messy desk and one patient dog, Tiggy, who sits in her wine box behind the desk day in, day out, while I’m writing Well, as promised in my last blog, here I am on 4 April 2019 with the first draft of Audrey under my belt. I kept a note of the daily […]

There is something intensely exciting about starting to write a new book. I don’t mean starting from scratch, I mean that delicious moment when most of the research has been done and you feel it is time to pull a blank page to the fore, to pick up a pen (or keyboard) and write. Although […]

Researching non-fiction is a bit like being a police detective, I imagine. Sniffing out clues and piecing together a story that brings the facts to the fore in a convincing way. I also imagine it must be near impossible to put a perfect case together as life is not neat and linear. It is chaotic, […]

Where were you born? I think it is fair to say that most people know their place of birth and probably the name of the hospital, maternity home, house name or number where they came into this world. Thinking about it, though, it is in some sense a strange question because chances are you have […]

I spent a week in July teaching narrative non-fiction to a group of writers in Devon. It was a memorable week, not least because the weather was perfect and the Arvon Centre at Totleigh Barton is truly a magical spot. My fellow tutor and travel writer, Rory MacLean, enchanted us with his stories from his […]

My friend Emma recently gave me a book about authors’ gardens. It is a beautiful publication that celebrates the gardens of great writers including Agatha Christie, John Ruskin, Beatrix Potter, Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke. She joked in her note to me that perhaps one day my garden would make it into such a book. […]

In March I had an email from a lady in Australia who I have been corresponding with over the past year or so. I suppose she is what I would describe as an e-friend but I feel that makes her sound unreal, which she most definitely is not. Whatever the description of our relationship, I […]

Heil 15 März, or Hail the fifteenth of March, was the cipher key used by SS signal regiments in the field in 1937. The Nazis entered Prague, taking control of Bohemia and Moravia on that day in 1939. Was it a coincidence that this date was already in the mind of the German high command […]

I celebrate women every day of my writing life. I do it quietly and with respect, humour and awe. I write about ordinary women who do extraordinary things when faced with intractable problems or simply difficult situations. So while I am thrilled with all the fuss being made about International Women’s Day in this significant […]

One of the great joys of being a writer is having the luxury to spend time playing with English. It is a magnificent language – rich, colourful, brimming with borrowed words from all over the linguistic world and infinitely versatile. It can also be exceptionally precise, although it does not have a word for my […]

If you savour the concept of a British village in the middle of the twentieth century it is all too easy to think of a chocolate-box scene with cottages and houses surrounding a duckpond with a postman cycling by whistling while a farmer drives his sheep to market. So it may come as some surprise to […]

By the summer of 1940 Britain stood alone on the edge of Europe with nothing to protect her apart from the Channel. This is an oft stated fact that has become entirely accepted by the majority of people. But is it true? Strictly speaking, yes. Geographically we stand on the edge of Europe and always […]