Gillian Tindall begann ihre Karriere als preisgekrönte Romanautorin und hat zwar weiterhin Belletristik veröffentlicht, sich aber auch eine beeindruckende Nische in eigenwilliger Sachliteratur geschaffen, die Orte brillant einfängt. Bekannt für die Qualität ihres Schreibens und die akribische Natur ihrer Recherchen, ist Tindall eine Meisterin der Miniaturgeschichte, die kleine Geschichten mit großer Wirkung erforscht.
From Eugenia Stanhope who sold Lord Chesterfield's scandalous letters, to the autocratic vicar who held the same parish from age 28 to 82, from the just- literate wife of a parish clerk who wrote riddles in his registers, to the cow-keeper who farmed 226 acres in Hornsey till he sold them profitably when the railways came through.
When Gillian found a cache of letters in a deserted house in France, recently emptied of 150 years of a family's possessions, she uncovered the obscure & moving life of Celestine Chaumette. This is a recreation of the vanished world of 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.
The seventeenth-century London Wenceslaus Hollar knew is now largely destroyed or buried. It is a carefully researched factual account, but she has also employed her novelist's skill to form an intricate whole - a life's texture which is also an absorbing and occasionally tragic story. schovat popis
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.
This is an historical study of Bombay, the chief city of Western India, which focuses on the architecture and on the British roots of the metropolis, the people who built and ran the city as well as the importance of trade.
Her study shows how Paris has drawn into its magnetic field people who have variously found there education or enlightenment, a refuge or a secret garden, even a different identity.
Just across the River Thames from St Paul's Cathedral stands an old and elegant house. they have seen the countrified lanes of London's marshy south bank give way to a network of wharves, workshops and tenements - and then seen these, too, become dust and empty air.
Seven marriage proposals written to Celestine in the early 1860s, and carefully preserved by her, offer a glimpse of rural nineteenth century French life
Born into a poor family in the rocky heart of France in the year of Waterloo, tramping hundreds of miles to Paris to find work at the age of fourteen, Martin Nadaud grew up to become a stone mason, a revolutionary and a Member of Parliament. After the failure of the 1848 revolution, he was forced to flee to a long and lonely exile in England, seeking work on the building sites of Victorian London before becoming a schoolmaster in Wimbledon under an assumed name. He made his final triumphant return to his homeland in 1870, as modern France was created in turmoil. Publicly, it was a life finally crowned with success. But on a private level Nadaud suffered griefs and losses that left their mark. With access to family letters and personal papers that have lain unrevealed in France for the last hundred years, Gillian Tindall has constructed a moving and compelling picture of a working man against his colourful times.
