Send us a text During the Second World War, Ruth Brook escaped Nazi persecution in Germany and followed her wartime sweetheart, a Lancaster Bomber into the RAF. As a WAAF, she quickly found a sense of her own purpose. Ruth was offered a job as a cook, a typist or a flight mechanic. She picked up a spanner and her life began. From welding to hydraulics, WW2 was a intense training ground for a young woman starting out in life. In her 101 years Ruth has packed a lot in. From working as a...

Send us a textFormer policewoman and district nurse turned novelist, Jean Fullerton has written over 20 novels but recently published something a bit closer to home, her memoir, A Child of the East End. In conversation at the Write Idea Festival, Jean shared eye-watering stories of her childhood in Wapping, the curse of family secrets, bum-stamping and sexism in the police force and why we romanticise the past, Jean proves there is no such thing as a ordinary life. I started by asking her wha...

Send us a textIn the 19th century it was surprisingly easy for a woman to be consigned to the misery of an asylum. Many in fact weren't actually mentally ill. Husband tired of his wife? A woman who bore an illegitimate child? A woman who didn't want to marry the man her parents had chosen for her? Or anyone, in short, who didn't conform to the narrow standards of society.Once a woman was incarcerated, it was almost impossible to get out of a place often described as 'death traps'.Author...

Send us a textHistorical fiction author Kristy Cambron wears a lot of hats. She's a Christy Award-winning author of historical fiction, including her bestselling novels, THE BUTTERFLY AND THE VIOLIN and THE PARIS DRESSMAKER, as well as nonfiction titles. She also serves as Vice President and literary agent with Gardner Literary, where she was named ACFW Agent of the Year in 2024.Kristy squeezed in time to chat with me about our shared love of research and forgotten stories from the past....

Send us a textNeil Barclay is an award-winning civilian librarian at HMP Thameside. Nominated by prisoners, and described by his colleagues as “our library superstar”, Neil has been praised for the outstanding dedication, skill and creativity he has shown in transforming the prison’s library into a dynamic learning and resource centre, much valued by prisoners and staff, and described as “the envy of other prisons”. Here he shares with us his passionate belief that books and reading have...

Send us a textRachel Hore is the multi-million selling Sunday Times author of thirteen novels with her fourteenth, Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge, coming out next year.Rachel is an avid reader. 'My reading addiction got properly under way when I was five and our family moved from Surrey, England, where I was born, to live in Hong Kong because of my father’s job. I loved Hong Kong, but I also missed home, and one of the great excitements was receiving parcels of books from relatives in the UK. Whe...

Send us a textDonna Jones Alward is prolific author, writing over sixty novels. Here she explains why her first historical fiction novel, When the World Fell Silent, challenged her to grapple with a dark chapter in Canada's history...When the World Fell SilentA Globe and Mail and Toronto Star bestseller1917. Halifax, Nova ScotiaNora Crowell wants more than her sister’s life as a wife and mother. As WWI rages across the Atlantic, she becomes a lieutenant in the Canadian Army Nursing Corp. But ...

Send us a textWhen Brian was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2010, his friend Alison offered to write letters to cheer him up. Over the next two years, as Brian’s cancer moved from stage III to IV, Alison’s letters kept on coming.The letters became part of Brian’s recovery process, while Alison discovered a passion for writing she never knew existed. Brian is now cancer-free, Alison is a writer, and the two have a relationship that only the term ‘best friends’ can describe. Alison and Bri...

Send us a textWhat happens when ordinary people are faced with extraordinary choices?In her second blistering novel set on the Channel Island of Jersey, Beyond Summerland, author Jenny Le Coat turns her attentions to the often overlooked issue of what happened after Liberation Day...Jean Parris was a child when her adored father was taken away by the Nazis. As she and her mother wait anxiously for news, the life Jean thought she knew begins to fall apart.Hazel Le Tourneur has never conformed ...

Send us a textThis July marks the 136th anniversary of the matchwomens strike at Bryant & May match factory in London's East End in 1888.Exposing the truth of the ‘poor waif matchgirl’ historian Louise Raw fills us in on the true story of the vibrant working class women who downed tools, went on strike and changed the course of history.Her work on the Bryant and May Matchwomen altered the way the modern trade union movement was understood. "It was actually begun by young women and g...

Send us a textIvor was just 12 years old when he was taken to Auschwitz. He survived with the help of his older brother, but the rest of his family were murdered in the Holocaust.He was brought to England in November 1945 as one of a group of orphans, and started forging a new life. Ivor built a successful clothes manufacturing company; married and had four children (and now six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren). For half a century, the past stayed in the past – until it could...

Send us a textSwathed in luxurious fur coats, wearing diamond rings as a knuckledusters and hats to hide their stolen wares, Britain's most notorious all-female gang ruled the tenements of Waterloo and Elephant and Castle and earned the respect of Soho's most feared underworld bosses. In this fascinating conversation, bestselling author Beezy Marsh reveals how she discovered the story of this notorious gang at a funeral and then used painstaking investigative journalism to uncover the richnes...

Send us a textMervyn Kersh recently celebrated his 99th birthday. Nearly a century of life on earth and what a life he has had. The hair may have turned silver, but he still has the same twinkle in his eye that he had as a young man.I went to visit Mervyn at his immaculate home in Cockfosters, which he shares with his two cats, and over a cup of tea and ginger biscuits he told me his remarkable story. In this episode you can listen to his experiences of the D Day landings, entering a bo...

Send us a text98 years ago today, Norma Jeane Mortenson was born in California. She went onto become the legend that was Marilyn Monroe.No one knows more about Marilyn than writer Michelle Morgan who has dedicated her life to peeling back the layers of this fascinating woman. In this conversation Michelle shares the lesser known sides of Marilyn and reveals a warm, funny woman who loved reading and nothing more than browsing dusty book shelves. Monroe was a passionate book lover wi...

Send us a textThe BBC’s period drama “Call the Midwife” made an eccentric, lovable community of nuns and nurses famous the world over. But what of the formidable East End mothers whose babies they delivered? Join me, Kate Thompson and Smithsonian historian Alan Capps as we delve deep into the social history of some truly remarkable women.During the 20th century, London’s history-rich East End, in common with all working-class communities, was a fiercely matriarchal society. Women in aprons an...

Send us a textMaggie Brookes is an ex-journalist, BBC TV producer and creative writing lecturer, now full-time novelist and poet. She was born in London and has been writing stories and poems since she was six. Maggie says: "The principal theme which recurs in my work is the strength and courage of women in adversity. I am drawn to stories which take place in wartime because because of my parents’ experience in the second world war. My dad was a prisoner of war and my m...

Send us a text99-year-old Professor George Leitmann is a unique man. He is both a holocaust survivor and a WW2 US Army veteran who helped to liberate Nazi occupied France and Germany. Nazi persecution of Jewish people forced George and his family to flee their home in Austria and emigrate to the USA. Tragically, his father Josef was unable to get a visa to join them. Initially the family received Red Cross Messages from Josef but by 1940 these had stopped.As soon as he was old enough, Ge...

Send us a textIn this episode, award-winning historical fiction author, Hazel Gaynor remembers the World War Two ‘seaevacuees’, the children sent away from Britain by sea to escape the bombings at home. This is an often-forgotten part of the history of the war, overshadowed by more familiar events, and it inspired Hazel to write her new novel, The Last Lifeboat.Here she shares the heroine at the heart of this survival story, how she researched it and why these women and children deserve to be...

Send us a textIn The Sugar Girls of Love Lane, out today, Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi, the authors of the Sunday Times bestseller The Sugar Girls, tell the remarkable stories of those who worked at the famous Tate & Lyle factory in Liverpool. For over a hundred years until it closed in 1981, Henry Tate’s flagship sugar refinery at Love Lane dominated the Liverpool skyline – and was the beating heart of the local community. More than 10,000 workers passed through the doors of the ...

Send us a text‘Reading gives us a privacy of the mind. Librarians are heroes.’ Librarian turned bestselling author Janet Skeslien Charles told me. In this episode we discuss the remarkable true story behind the brave Parisian librarians in WW2 who inspired The Paris Library. Her new book, Miss Morgan's Book Brigade, out April 30 2024, based on a true story of a group of intrepid women who lived in a crumbling chateau 40 miles from the front in WW1 to help heal the atrocities of war. We discus...