Growing up in rural North Yorkshire, I kept myself busy with paper and pen. ‘Writing stories again, Liz?’ my mum smiled in 1968 when I was 15, as I scribbled dialogue and plot twists, dreaming of beco

They’d have loved the drama of it – bowing out almost exactly ten years apart. Born in the same year and with the same initials, both queens of the bonkbuster. One was a Hollywood lioness, the other a

The lives of Clara and Nancy are worlds apart – but is it time for them to finally live out their dream?

Did you know that Thomas Müntzer, leader of the German Peasants’ War in 1525, used a rainbow flag to rally his followers? It’s an aptly exuberant image for the radical charisma of Müntzer, and for the

What revealed the magic of books for me was The Wind in the Willows. When I was five, I contracted measles, which meant I had to spend my days in bed in a darkened room. My mother sat outside my bedro

Mary Pargeter was starting to feel her age. When did she first attend the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony at Greenwood House? A quarter of a century, and she was retired even then. Had she loc