On a hot late summer’s day, a crowd of 60,000 gathered in St Peter’s Field. They came from all over Lancashire – ordinary working-class men, women and children – walking to the sound of hymns and folk songs, wearing their best clothes and holding silk banners aloft. Their mood was happy, their purpose wholly serious: […]
The Conviction of Cora Burns by Carolyn Kirby
Birmingham, 1885. Born in a gaol and raised in a workhouse, Cora Burns has always struggled to control the violence inside her. Haunted by memories of a terrible crime, she seeks a new life working as a servant in the house of scientist Thomas Jerwood. Here, Cora befriends a young girl, Violet, who seems to […]
‘Paedo Hunter Turns Prey!’ The ironic fate of the father of tabloid journalism
In the past few years, amateur paedophile hunters have rarely been far from the headlines of Britain’s tabloid newspapers, writes author Carolyn Kirby. “The nation is in the grip of an extraordinary phenomenon involving possibly thousands of have-a-go investigators,” said the Daily Mail in June last year. Sometimes caught on the wrong side of the […]
The Five by Hallie Rubenhold
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their […]
Review: Les Miserables
Everything about Les Miserables is built on an epic scale. At around 1500 pages, depending on which edition is making your bookshelf sag, Victor Hugo’s novel (published in 1862) is not only physically enormous, but also it deals with MASSIVE themes: love, obsession, redemption, justice, fate and the nature of good and evil. It’s human […]
Review: The Long Song
The Long Song, (BBC1, 9pm) is an adaptation of Andrea Levy’s Man Booker shortlisted novel and tells the story of July, a slave growing up on a Jamaican plantation in the dying days of slavery. The first episode takes place against the backdrop of the ‘Baptist War’, or ‘Christmas Rebellion’, a slave revolt that increased […]
Review: Death and Nightingales
Locals will tell you that for six months of the year the lakes are in Fermanagh, and for the other six, Fermanagh is in the lakes. Rain sweeps in quickly in this small corner of Ulster. Waters rise and landscapes change. Frontiers are always on the move and borders once thought traversable can suddenly become […]
Peterloo by Jacqueline Riding
Manchester, August 1819: 60,000 people had gathered in the cause of parliamentary reform. To those defending the status quo, the vote was not a universal right, but a privilege of wealth and land ownership. To radical reformers the fundamental overhaul of a corrupt system was long overdue. The people had come to hear one such […]