From My Blog
I’m back – and so is ‘Harlots, Housewives and Heroines’
After a little blip last week caused by nasty hackers, my website is back in business. All Web Services managed to raise it from the dead. Thanks! Also back this week, from Sunday at 8pm at BBC Four, is my series ‘Harlots, Housewives and Heroines’. Here’s a reminder of what it was all about… ‘Fame
an interview about classical music, in Gramophone magazine
I was recently interviewed by Martin Cullingford of Gramophone magazine. While I do like Michael Bublé as much as the next woman (whaddya mean, you’re disappointed in me? He really is a lovely young man.) I have spent really quite a lot of my life playing the piano. As you’ll read here, should you be interested… Gramophone
A week of my life, in pictures…
It was back to work with a bang for me last week, following the Christmas holidays, with quite a busy few days filming our TV series ‘Fit To Rule?’ as well as going to the office. I thought a photo diary might be an interesting way of showing you what we got up to. First up, notice
My suggestions for Xmas holiday reading (warning: really quite royal)
Like me, you may well currently be stockpiling some nice new books to read over the Christmas holidays, so here are some suggestions. I’ve read and enjoyed each of these over the last few months. Yes, the list has an eccentrically royal flavour because I’ve been working on a TV project about the history of
What it’s like to appear on The Today Programme
This Wednesday morning I was on The Today Programme on Radio 4, to talk about the research done by Dr Helen O’Connell at Durham University into peasant women’s lives in nineteenth-century Ireland. She’d rather brilliantly discovered how they were castigated by their social superiors for drinking tea: i.e. wasting their money, getting addicted to it,
How I deal with The Cold
People often ask me if I enjoy filming TV programmes, and the answer is YES. Of course! We go to interesting places, at interesting times of day (it’s wonderful being in silent, deserted Westminster Abbey at 7am). I get to interview experts, which means I spend two hours asking them anything I want in the
The secret life of furniture (from yesterday’s Times)
I recently had the pleasure and privilege of going round the V&A’s new furniture gallery, which opens this week, and writing about it for yesterday’s Times. Here’s my piece: ‘I’ve a great respect for things!’ says Madame Merle, in Henry James’s 1881 novel A Portrait of a Lady. ‘We’re each of us made up of some cluster
What it’s like to live at Hampton Court Palace
Lucy Denyer from The Sunday Times recently interviewed me about my life when I lived at Hampton Court Palace. Here’s the finished result… ‘When I started my job as chief curator of the Historic Royal Palaces in February 2002, I moved down from Scotland and didn’t have anywhere to live, so for a while I
Dorothy Hartley’s ‘Food in England’: recipes to make at home
Here for your delectation I’ve chosen some of the easier and more palatable recipes from ‘Food in England’ – nothing involving offal! Stargazey Pie This is a recipe I made with the present-day pupils at the boys’ grammar school in Skipton, Dorothy’s birthplace and her childhood home. It’s fairly easy: you tuck fresh pilchards (head and
Am I a scholar?
At lunchtime a few days ago, I was in the staff room at Kensington Palace and browsing through ‘History Today’. This caught my eye, and I sat down to read… ‘In recent decades few fields of historical inquiry have produced as rich a body of work as the British Civil Wars. Sarah Mortimer offers a guide
