When I moved to London in the mid 1980’s I was introduced by housemates and colleagues to many pubs in North London. The Island Queen was...

'Nothing of the Sort' On Wednesday, October 24th 1934 at the Old Bailey, Carmen Fernandez stood in front of the dock, where she was to...

In November 1984, within a month of moving to London, I attended a music and film show at the Barbican Hall, marking seventy years of the...

Thinking of one of the other officers in the Italian camp in which they were prisoners of war, novelist Dan Billany wrote:  "He is...

Cigarette Cards In the 1930's they had their ‘celebrities’ just as we have today, but to a modern eye, most of their household names seem...

I often claim that London boozers are my natural habitat. Centuries of dramas, great and small, from just one pub can feed the...

The everyday experience of ordinary people in any era has little to do with the words and deeds of monarchs and politicians, and...

In the late 1980s, when I lived in Wood Green and worked at King’s Cross, the underground line I used most was the Piccadilly Line....

Those who have read Until the Real Thing Comes Along and When Summer is Gone sometimes ask about Charlie Brown’s pub, which is heavily...

A few readers have been kind enough to comment that the London I have tried to recreate in the first two novels seems real - in the case...