Articles

Newer things here:

• My free weekly newsletter Histories, ferreting out first-hand accounts from the hidden corners of history.
• The full account of my live-tweeted ‘Around the World in Eight Hours’ walk in London, April 2022.
• Other Twitter adventures appear here, e.g. #10tweetadventure threads.
• Kenneth Grahame’s essay on walking, ‘The fellow that goes alone’, online in full for the first time here.

Here are a few old articles which have remained popular at this site:

• In search of Colin’s Barn (aka The Hobbit House)
• Exploring the Falcon Brook
• Walking the River Effra
• Omai goodness: a noble savage
• Animal words are strange fishes
• Does affiliate marketing work? Do the math(s)
• Shaking spears at each other [on the authorship of WS’s works]

And there are some more rambly old blog posts from 2004 to 2012, if you must.

Books

Aside from editing many books of all kinds, I have written or contributed to the following:

• I co-created three volumes of Trivia Quiz Games books (2020)
• I wrote/compiled Thomas Cromwell: A Historical Sourcebook (2020) and Mudlarking: A Historical Sourcebook (2020)
• I co-authored the quiz book How Many Hippos? (2019)
• I wrote How to Research Historic Occupations (2019)
• I edited and published The History & Heritage Handbook (2015)
• Previous authorship includes The A-Z of Genealogy Websites and 101 Family History Tips (both Future Publishing, 2006) and The Monster Guide to Jobhunting (Pearson Education, 2001)
• I made sizeable contributions to Human: the Definitive Guide to Our Species (Dorling Kindersley, 2004) and 1001 Inventions that Changed the World (Cassell, 2009)