Gillian Tindall

"Tindall's voice is richly her own: tender but unsentimental and lit by intimate knowledge of her chosen world." - Colin Thubron Culminating a distinguished career spanning more than 60 years, historian Gillian Tindall has written a novel as her final statement. In an astonishing feat of literary imagination, she projects herself back onto one of her forebears to conjure a compelling vision of 17th century England. By trade, the main character is a metal founder, an occupation that leads him from the villages of Sussex to the bell foundry in Spitalfields. This is a hymn to those who pass through life not leaving a trace, except in the hearts of those into whose lives they have been cast.

*As read on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week*'A genius for a certain kind of social history that, in shining a light on one small place, illuminates a huge amount' Sunday TelegraphA toy train. A stack of letters. A tiny pulse glass, inherited from her great-great-grandfather, which was used to time a patient's heartbeat before pocket watches... Gillian Tindall, one of our most admired domestic history writers, examines seemingly humble objects to trace the personal and global memories stored within them, and re-animate the ghostly heartbeats of lost lives.'Elegiac... Tindall reflects on a lifetime's interest in historical recovery' The Telegraph'Tindall is a fine historian and writes with a wryness of everyday human foibles' The Times

Visiting Stepney, Liverpool Street, Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, Gillian Tindall traces the course of many of these historical journeys across time as well as space. The Tunnel Through Time uncovers the lives of those who walked where many of our streets still run.

'A major achievement' Ronald Blythe, author of AkenfieldA Cotswold vicarage. A former girls' boarding school in Surrey. A Jacobean house now buried in inner London. Three Houses, Many Lives tells the stories not only of the houses themselves but of the lives of the many people who lived in them.

A masterpiece of local history, by the Queen of the genre; Gillian Tindall has acquired a devoted readership through her lovingly researched works, such as the prize-winning "The House" by the Thames and "Celestine: Voices from a French Village". A journey through time: from a scattering of cottages along a pre-roman horse track, to a medieval parish and staging post for travellers, onwards into a prosperous Tudor village favoured by gentlemen for their country seats and an 18th century resort of pleasure gardens eventually transformed by a warren of railway lines into a thickly populated working-class district. Fragments of this past can still be found by the observant eye. This is one of a precious handful of books (such as Montaillou and Akenfield) that in their precise examination of a particular locality open our understanding of the universal themes of the past. In this case it is Kentish Town in London that reveals its complex secrets to us, through the resurrection of its now buried rivers and wells, coaching house, landlords, traders, and simple tennants.

Gillian Tindall brings Paris alive - whether it's the network of streets that form the Left Bank, the resonance of 'Bohemia' and its garrets, cafes and artists, 'Gay Paree' with its music halls and courtesans or the past chroniclers of the city such as Zola, George du Maurier and Orwell.

'Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening and often, to a degree, shapes it ...' Elizabeth BowenThis compelling study explores the way the great themes of English and French fiction in the past two centuries have been expressed through writers' sense of place. Gillian Tindall shows how familiar landscapes - whether Yorkshire moors or Paris streets - can acquire the force of powerful metaphors: rural scenes which embody regret for a golden past; cities which come to stand, paradoxically, both for decay and alienation and for hopes of a new life; country houses which survive in the memory as repositories of youthful dreams, spiritual mansions of the soul.A subtle and complex argument develops, through illuminating and detailed reading of a host of novelists, from Dickens and Zola to Alain Fournier and Evelyn Waugh. The result is a highly original view of two complementary cultures, a book which asks us to take a fresh look at the way in which writers map out and inhabit their own particular countries of the mind.

'Like London, like Paris or New York or pre-war Alexandria, Bombay contains not just many different social worlds but whole solar systems of different societies moving separately and intricately over the same territory. Ever since its insignificant and hesitant beginnings it has acted as a draw for people of so many races and languages, Indian, Middle Eastern and European, that there is no one tongue in general use there. For a while the largest city east of Suez till you came to Tokyo, and the largest in the British Empire after London, Bombay has always just missed being a world capital.'This is Gillian Tindall's own description. Bombay (Mumbai) is indeed one of the great cities of the world and this book, first published in 1982, does full justice to it.'Fascinating. Gillian Tindall has brought the great city richly to life. It is a keenly perceptive account - at once loving and stringent.' Colin Thubron.'A glowing evocation of a great exotic subject . . . A celebration of the city' John Carey, Sunday Times'Her feeling for the past is not tinged with curry or sentimentality . . . her perceptions, visual and historical, are acute . . . a good an unusual choice as Bombay's biographer' Observer'Insatiably curious, novelist and historian, Gillian Tindall does not rest until she gets tot he origins of whatever interests her. Here she has focused on architecture and the British roots of the metropolis. She has accomplished the job admirably' - New Statesman

they have seen the countrified lanes of Londonâ??s marshy south bank give way to a network of wharves, workshops and tenements â?? and then seen these, too, become dust and empty air. Rich with anecdote and colour, this fascinating book breathes life into the forgotten inhabitants of the house â?? the prosperous traders;

Yet its populous river, its timbered streets, fashionable ladies, old St Paul's, the devestation of the Fire, the palace of Whitehall and the meadows of Islington live on for us in his etchings. Drawing on numerous sources, Gillian Tindall creates a montage of Hollar's life and times and of the illustrious lives that touched his.