Month: December 2018

This evening, in an event at Petersfield Bookshop in Hampshire, a short story authored by me will be read out as one of three runners up in a ghost story writing competition to celebrate the bookshop’s centenary. The competition, which was won by James Kingston, called for ghost stories set mainly in a bookshop and received over 300 entries. The winning entries were selected by Michelle Magorian. It came as something of a surprise to me to discover I had won a prize of £100 worth of books for the story I submitted, entitled ‘This Is My Book’, since my decision to enter the competition was a rather whimsical one. Although I wrote a great deal of fiction in my teens and twenties, including several full-length novels, I never made any attempt to enter any creative writing competitions or get my writing published, and I have written no fiction at all for almost a decade. Perhaps the fact that the judges liked my short story is an indication that writing nonfiction improves one’s fiction-writing skills in subtle ways.

Unfortunately I am unable to attend the reading of ‘This Is My Book’, but I hope the audience enjoys it and experiences a subtle thrill of horror…

My review of Ralph Houlbrooke’s Love and Dishonour in Elizabethan England: Two Families and a Failed Marriage has just appeared in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History. The book is a fascinating microhistorical study of the unauthorised marriage of the Protestant Charles Forth of Butley and the Catholic Elizabeth Jerningham of Somerleyton in 1582 and its subsequent failure. As a study of intermarriage between Protestants and recusants in the gentry community of Elizabethan Suffolk, the book is a very important contribution to the history of Catholicism in East Anglia. The Jerninghams of Somerleyton, Suffolk were the senior branch of the family that later went on to dominate the Catholic community in Norfolk from their base at Costessey Hall for centuries. However, by the late sixteenth century the Suffolk Jerninghams were in serious decline, having lost control of Lothingland (the ‘tail’ of coastal Suffolk that curves up towards Great Yarmouth). Lothingland had hitherto offered significant resistance to the Reformation and may even have been considered as a potential landing site for a Spanish invasion to restore the Catholic faith. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Catholicism in East Anglia or the local politics of the East Anglian gentry in the early modern period.