Category: Archive of blog posts
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Citoyennes: women of the Paris Commune
First posted May 5th, 2015 (links updated/revised 26.2.26) The mythical figure of the pétroleuse, hideous or heroic depending on your point of view, has now almost been forgotten. For decades it was the most abiding image of the 1871 Paris Commune, and undoubtedly helped to hide the true history of real women’s involvement in France’s…
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Mr Peacock’s Possession: sources & background reading
As noted in the book, the most important sources for Mr Peacock’s Possessions were: Elsie K Morton Crusoes of Sunday Island, 1957. Steven Gentry, Raoul & the Kermadecs: New Zealand’s Northernmost Islands, Steele Roberts, 2013. Margaret Pointer, Niue 1774-1974: 200 years of contact and change, Otago University Press, 2015. SOAS London Missionary Society Archives What follows now is not exactly a bibliography, and…
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Liberty’s Fire: sources and background reading
“What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalising to the bourgeois mind?” Simply put, the Paris Commune was the radical municipal government elected to run the French capital in March 1871 immediately after the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris. This revolution shouldn’t be confused with the first French Revolution in 1789, or the…
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That Burning Summer: sources & background reading
Interested in exploring any of the history, ideas or places in That Burning Summer? Here are some good starting points – books, short stories, websites, online articles, films, museums etc, all loosely grouped by theme, many of which obviously overlap. Clearly, this is far from definitive. Most of this I used while I was writing the novel, but I…
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A World Between Us: sources & background reading
There have been well over 15,000 books written in English about the Spanish Civil War – twice that many in Spanish, and more are published every month in Spain. Here I’ve listed some of the books that influenced me most when I was writing A World Between Us, as well as a few more recent publications, many…
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Songs from the Spanish Civil War
You can hear different versions of nearly all the songs in A World Between Us on YouTube. I haven’t been able to locate all the original links I posted when I first wrote this post but I’ve done my best to find good alternatives! Many of these videos include evocative archive images of the Spanish Civil War. From Barcelona…