Articles

Newer things here:

• My free weekly newsletter Histories, ferreting out first-hand accounts from the hidden corners of history.
• Various pieces related to walking (generally exploring themes of landscape and/or history).
• 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, along with other random things:

• 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]
• Oxford Orbital – an 18-mile cycle route around Oxford’s satellite villages (one-page PDF from 2006)
• Two old series of articles about saints and British religious dissenters.
• ‘Harry Potter and the Viscera of Kittens’

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 wrote/compiled Oxford: Encounters through History – First-hand tales since 1500 (2021)
• 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)