Madame Guillotine

A visit to Versailles is always a massive treat and especially so when you’re there with someone special who has never been before and so get a chance to show off all your special history and art history knowledge to a (mostly) captive audience! I’ve been fortunate enough to visit Versailles six times now, first going there in 1989 when I travelled to Paris for the bicentenary of the French Revolution, and feel like I have been privileged to see the palace grow, change, develop and even blossom over the decades since that first amazing visit. I remember that back […]

A trip to beautiful Kensington Palace is always a massive high point of the year for me as I love visiting it so much. It’s just such a beautiful old building and so full of fascinating history – I can’t resist it! Last week’s visit was especially amazing as it was to attend the press view of the brand new Fashion Rules display, which showcases outfits and accessories worn by the Queen and the late Princess Margaret and Princess Diana, all of whom resided within the palace at some point and have themselves become part of its immensely rich, occasionally […]

First of all, I am going to apologise for being so quiet over the past few months. As I’ve mentioned on here a few times, I suffer from severe depression and anxiety which have been exacerbated by the dismal winter weather and left me feeling really down in the dumps lately. I’ve always had a real problem with SAD anyway but it’s been particularly bad this year and has left me needing to spend my time doing very little indeed and not really up to very much at all. It’s not been all bad though – I finished my biography […]

The opening of the new Museum of London exhibition every October is one of the high points of my year as they always have amazingly imaginative displays that showcase different aspects of the capital’s rich and varied history and culture. There’s not many things that I would willingly roll out of bed for at 3am on my birthday but this is definitely one of them! Last year’s exhibition took a close look at the city’s most famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, bringing to life the world that Conan Doyle’s most celebrated creation inhabited. This year, however, although the focus remains […]

Although it was no doubt the bane of many other students’ lives, I remember absolutely loving Arthur Miller’s The Crucible as a teenager and read my copy several times over. Actually, as an aside, when I recently moved house and had to pack and then unpack all of my books again, I was a bit mortified to notice how low brow my more recent reading material seems in comparison to the sort of thing that I was reading as a young adolescent when I was devouring the likes of Ulysses, The Crucible, War and Peace and even several Balzac novels […]

Exterior of Clarence House. Photographer Mark Fiennes I am WAY behind with EVERYTHING right now due to health woes, moving house and birthdays chez nous! I’m going to try and get on top of things a bit more from now on though as I have a massive backlog of posts to write and all manner of cool and interesting things to share with you all. Those of you with long memories may well recall that I paid a rather splendid visit to Buckingham Palace not that long ago where I was permitted to take photographs of the state rooms – […]