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Mary Hoffman

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How to upstage a queen

Jill Armitage's previous book was about Arbella Stuart, a possible claimant to the throne of England when Elizabeth l died, and she does make a cameo appearance here. But the star of the show - and the "Countess" of the title is Bess of Hardwick, who was Arbella's grandmother.

I don't know if it's just that we know so much already about the Tudor queens and the Scottish thorn in Elizabeth's side but Bess would be a remarkable woman in any age. She was born in humble circumstances, the third child of a second son, a gentleman but only of minor gentry.

Elizabeth was always known as Bess, fortunately for us, or there would be two Elizabeths as well as two Marys in this book. Her first marriage was as a teenager, to a boy younger than herself, who died the following year. She never lived with Robert Barlow and is likely to have been a virgin widow. Nevertheless she had some claim on his property and spent a long time at law, trying to get anything out of his family.

Three years after Robert's death, Bess, still only around twenty years old, married Sir William Cavendish. They were married for ten years, until his death, during which time she bore him eight children, six of whom lived to be adults - a good record for the 16th century. Sir William had property in Derbyshire, including the Chatsworth Estates. (His heirs became the Dukes of Devonshire, who still own Chatsworth House. Andrew Cavendish was married to the famous "Debo," née Mitford, who made Chatsworth House what it is today. I think Bess would have approved of her.)

Bess of Hardwick in later life

When Sir William died, after ten years of marriage, Bess was responsible for his two surviving daughters from an earlier marriage as well as her own six children. By now Lady Cavendish was still only around thirty years old and good-looking and she attracted many suitors. So a couple of years later she married, for the third time, to Sir William St. Loe. He had two daughters by a previous marriage too but at his death, six years later, he left everything to Bess, cutting out his own children and his younger brother, who might well have poisoned him.

Bess was now a very wealthy woman, with an annual income worth millions in today's terms. She soon attracted another husband, her fourth and last, George Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury. Countess Shrewsbury's vast income was appropriated by her husband in the custom of the time. But she was now a significant person at court, being one of Queen Elizabeth's Ladies of the Bedchamber.

The Earl had seven children already and two of his sons married two of Bess's young daughters in the year of their parents' marriage. Whether the Earl and Countess's marriage would have been happy in the long term, we can't know but Jill Armitage makes it clear that it didn't stand a chance once they had visited on them a Royal house guest.

Mary, known as Queen of Scots, was billeted on them by her cousin Queen Elizabeth shortly after their marriage and remained with them, under virtual house arrest, for the next fifteen years. But they didn't stay in one place: they were constantly on the move from one of their homes to another. And Mary had an extensive entourage and was expensive to keep. And of course there were constant plots to release her, to topple or assassinate Elizabeth and put a Catholic queen on the throne again.

Mary, Queen of Scots

I have never understood the fascination with this Mary. At least, I do understand it but don't share it. She is supposed to have been very charismatic and charming but her actions are quite repellent. She and Bess, who would have been ten years or more older, a mature female confidante, who treated the imprisoned queen with kindness, used to sit together doing embroidery to pass the long days of Mary's imprisonment.

It would have been natural for the two women to have chatted and gossiped, to have exchanged confidences, as women friends do. But, according to Jill Armitage, Mary used the rumours Bess unwisely passed on about the English queen's love life, to get her into trouble and put her out of favour.

And it seems she also used her charms on the ageing Earl, flirting with him and alienating him from his wife. Whether this is true or not, the Shrewsburys' marriage was on the rocks and they lived virtually apart for the ten years before his death. That was three years after Mary's execution at Fotheringhay Castle.

The Earl's death left Bess as Dowager Duchess of Shrewsbury and mother-in-law to the new Earl, Gilbert, who was married to her daughter, Mary. She was free to do as she liked for the first time for decades and what she liked was building projects. She was a shrewd business woman and always fought for her rights, from the day of her first husband's death. She was the second richest woman in England after the queen, enjoying income from the Barlow, Cavendish and St. Loe estates and a third of that from the Shresbury estates.

She also had a life interest in several properties, including land near her birthplace in Hardwick, where she set about building the new, now famous, Hardwick Hall. It had an unusual amount of glass for a late 16th century manor house and was much admired. Bess moved into Hardwick Hall around her seventieth birthday. She ordered a grand funeral monument for herself but lived until she was 81 in 1608, outliving Elizabeth and the other queens in this book.

Before Elizabeth, there was Lady Jane Grey, the "nine days queen" and then Mary Tudor, the first Monarch of England in her own right.

Lady Jane Grey - the Streatham portrait

In any other context, Lady Jane would have been the heroine of this narrative. As I wrote in my story "Learn to Die" in the History Girls' anthology Daughters of Time (Templar 2014), she was not the helpless pawn she has sometimes been portrayed as, but a young woman of steely determination and unshakable Protestant faith. Bess of Hardwick was a friend of the family and Lady Jane was godmother to her second child, a daughter called Temperance, who sadly died in infancy.

Four years after this Lady Jane Grey was named as Edward Vl's heir and embarked on the disastrous course that led to her execution.

Because the people rejected her claim, albeit one sanctioned by the late boy king, and preferred Henry Vlll's daughter Mary.

This was a tricky time for Bess and her husband of the time, William Cavendish, who were both Protestants. But Queen Mary became godmother to their fifth child, a son called Charles. A shrewd choice in the circumstances.

Bess of Hardwick remains the real star of this book and I'd love to read a book just about her. She was one of the most remarkable women to emerge in Renaissance England and lived a life as eventful as any queen's.

Jill Armitage, author of Four Queens and a Countess

(I have adapted the Guardian's weekly Review section template for this short post,* making it refer just to History books and historical fiction.)

The history book I am currently reading

This is a bit of a cheat, as I've just finished it! It is odd for me to consider it as history, since I remember the scandal and the trial very well. But, like the rest of the country, I was gripped this summer by the TV series based on the book, with stellar acting by Hugh Grant, Ben Wishaw, Alex Jennings, Adrian Scarborough and the whole ensemble. And of course the cation takes place in the '60s and '70s. So, taking the 25-30 years or one generation back, as a criterion for what makes history or historical fiction, this fits.

It was like reading a thriller. The closest parallel I can think of it All the President's Men by Woodward and Bernstein or, further back, An Officer and a Gentleman by Robert Harris. It has the same forensic level of detail, without losing a bit of the tension.

The history book I wish I'd written

I can't be the only one, surely, although I am aware some consider it a "Marmite" book. Some people had trouble with the pronouns; others with the apparent re-habilitation of Thomas Cromwell and the corresponding dip in that side of the scales carrying the reputation of Thomas More, still basking in the light of A Man for All Seasons. But I think the achievement of taking one of the most famous periods of English history and making something fresh and new of it is quite staggering. I have read it and Bring up the Bodies three times, and seen both the plays and te TV series twice. I don't think I shall ever tire of it. And of course there is no way I could have written it.

The history book that had the greatest influence on me

I first became interested in later Plantagenet history because of Michael Boyd's History Cycles at the RSC in Stratford and saw each production twice, the second time over a long weekend (very long - all eight plays from Thursday to Sunday). I acted a part in scenes from Henry Vl Part two when I was school and am old enough to have enjoyed John Barton's Wars of the Roses adaptation for televison. (Though we got the DVDs of that recently and they have not worn well).

But, much as I enjoyed Michael Boyd's use of The Courtyard theatre in Stratford and performances by Jonathan Slinger, Clive Wood, Katy Stephens and Maureen Beattie, I was confused by some of the action. Then I found this book by the late John Julius Norwich and all was made clear. It sets out what happens in each of plays and has an accompanying chapter on the historical facts for the same period. Sorted.

The history book I think is most overrated

I know, I know! You are going to hate me. Two of my best friends and everyone else in my book group and the whole Management Committee of the Society of Authors love this work of historical fiction.

But I found the heroine just so annoyingly passive. She does what everyone else wants her to. She has no agency. "But that's how things were for young women in that period," my friends protest. I don't buy it. The heroine very nearly commits bigamy out of sheer inertia.

The history book I think is most underrated.

Anything by Ann Swinfen. Ann's recent and sudden death was a terrible shock to us here on the History Girls. Her books had found their audience though she was not yet well known generally. The Testament of Mariam was the first book she self-published after her previous traditional publishers did not what to take it and the first book of hers she generously gave me.

Ann was a superb writer and I could not understand why she wasn't a household name. She was also very prolific, with several series on the go. I hope her work lives on, as it should.

My earliest history reading memory

I had a big sister seven years older than me, whose reading choices I would copy and whose books I would borrow. She loved Georgette Heyer's Regency romances and the first one I read was Devil's Cub, which is actually a sequel to These Old Shades, which I caught up with later.

As a young teenager I was madly in love with Dominic de Vidal and I suppose this cover serves me right. I read a coverless hardback, brown I think. I haven't returned to Heyer but I am always happy to discover how much other writers really enjoy her.

The history book I would give as a gift

Again, I read this very young and it is of course a novel. But it's what convinced a lot of people to believe that Richard lll was much maligned, a victim of Tudor propaganda. I don't believe that now. I am not a Ricardian myself, although very much a Yorkist. But it's a clever book and very engaging.

The history book I'd like to be remembered for

Well, until I manage to write my own Plantagenet trilogy!

This is the story of Ned Lamberty, an orphan who join's The King's Men at the beginning of the 17th century. He starts with women's roles, as a boy player but at the beginning of my novel his voice is breaking. He is seventeen, but puberty came later then and it's not outside the range of normal for 1610.

Ned is being driven mad by glimpses of a woman in green. Is she real? Is she just another boy player in costume? Or is she from another world?

Ned has a great reverence for "the Poet," the best maker of plays in the company, and discovers that Shakespeare has had his own experiences of the supernatural.

It's a version of the Tam Lin story and I was very pleased with it.

*Shorter than usual this month, as I had a bit of an accident in London, falling on a South Kensington pavement and cutting my face and sustaining other injuries. I've had to spend time dealing with the consequences

By the time you read this, the exhibition Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece, at the British Museum, will be over but I caught it in its last week.

What three sculptures of Rodin would you expect to see in such an exhibition? The Kiss? The Thinker? The Burghers of Calais? Well, you would have been right. They were all there in some form or another. The Kiss was a plaster copy of the marble sculpture in Paris.

What is - or isn't - Greek, or classical about this? Well, for a start, it is much more intimate and personal than anything from the ancient world. It is Romantic in the History of Art sense but not the popular one. It scandalised its first viewers as a work of erotica, because the female figure is as involved in the embrace as the male. Also in the original, the male is aroused. It was intended as a portrait of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Maltesta, her brother-in-law, immortalised by Dante in his Inferno, Canto 5. But their lips haven't actually touched - it is a case of basium interruptum.

And indeed the lovers were interrupted and killed. All this is lost if you see it just as an anonymous smooch. The Italian subject seems at first to make and obvious link from the ancient Greeks to Rodin via Michelangelo and the French sculptor did visit Italy and greatly admired the statues by Michelangelo that he saw, especially the Prisoners, fighting their way out of their blocks of stone. And the Dying Slave in Paris was another influence.

Michelangelo himself saw many Greek statues, though some were Roman copies of Greek originals. Such as the Apollo Belvedere, a Roman copy of an earlier Greek bronze. The same is true of the Laocoon and his sons sculpture, unearthed in 1506 and believed at first to be a Greek original.

The Thinker was represented in the exhibition by a cast in "patinated plaster," giving it a reddish tinge. This, like the Kiss, was a figure originally intended to embellish The Gates of Hell, a work commissioned from Rodin in 1880, to form an entrance to a Museum of Decorative Arts. Neither the Museum nor the gates was ever built but Rodin's designs for it occupied him for decades and formed the basis for many of his subsequent achieved works.

What a sight it would have been if ever completed! A sort of counterpoint to Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise doors on the Baptistery in Florence.

But to revert to the Greeks, Rodin never saw the Parthenon itself but was deeply influenced by the marble friezes he saw in the British Museum. And plaster casts seen in France. However, he bought into the theories of eighteenth century art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who was immensely influential on European art and aesthetics.

For Winckelmann, Greek sculpture was 'pure" and white but we now know that the Parthenon friezes were coloured and closer to mediaeval effigy art than to some theoretical aesthetic of purity. Here is just one example of a restored figure, a Trojan archer,painted in the colours it would have had originally:

Credit: Marsyas

Rodin would have been surprised if not appalled. It is only relatively recently that it has become generally accepted that Greek marble sculptures were painted.

But Rodin wasn't copying the Greeks; he was doing something different. If you like, his marble, bronze and plaster figures were putting Greek sculpture into inverted commas, giving it a modern twist.

Influenced by Michelangelo, he practised the non finito technique, leaving his statues deliberately incomplete. And he was fascinated by fragments of classical sculpture and deliberately created "fragments" of work. These figures were not damaged by time and accident but created to be only partial.

What about the great bronze group, The Burghers of Calais? The original is of course in the eponymous city but Rodin gave permission for a limited number of copies to be made and one is familiar to Londoners from its position in Victoria Gardens on the Embankment of the Thames.

Credit: Roman Suzuki

This looks like figurative art, plain and simple. These are the six substantial citizens of Calais who were prepared to die to save the other inhabitants under siege from Edward lll. We know their names and a bit about them. They were saved by the intervention of Edward's queen, Philippa of Hainault, but they did not know their fate when they bravely offered to sacrifice themselves for the good of the rest of the population, who were starving after holding out for eleven months.. They have nooses around their necks and are holding the keys to the city.

As with so many of Rodin's monumental pieces, this one was controversial, because the figures were too human, showing fear and reluctance. It wasn't heroic for the nineteenth century burghers five and a half centuries after the event commemorated. Rodin's is a very modern view of heroism - scarifice in full knowledge of fear and weakness.

It seems a long way from the Greeks, whether the colourless or painted art. Rodin had no referents for what his actual burghers looked like but they are far from idealised; they are real men, who we can believe are hungry, frightened and hopeless. They are Everyman and that's what makes them important. We can identify with them and wonder if we would have done what they did.

Although Rodin clearly was influenced by classical sculpture, he does make something new, of his own. His work is far from derivative, always distinctive.

(All images are Creative Commons)

At the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester (till 16th September, then 2nd October to 9th December at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge) "Virginia Woolf: an exhibition inspired by her writings.

Full disclosure: I am not a big fan of Virginia Woolf. The books of hers I like most are Orlando and Flush, which are not considered the best. Oh and everyone likes Mrs Dalloway, which really is rather fine. But I don't think I will ever read The Waves again.

Still, I liked the idea of artworks inspired by her writings and all by women. My mother-in-law had two pen and ink drawings by Laura Knight (who was almost her contemporary) in her bedroom, so I was interested to see more of her work, which is among the better art in this very uneven exhibition. It is Knight's The Dark Pool that is featured on the poster, showing a young women in a red dress blown about by the wind, standing on a boulder looking down at a rock pool, which might or might not be on a beach in Cornwall.

Dame Laura Knight

As you might expect, the star is Virginia's older sister Vanessa Bell and her portrait of Virginia was was my favourite piece (though could you say that was "inspired by her writings"?). I am hampered by copyright here and can't show you what I saw.

Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell as children

The story of the two sisters has been told many times. Both their parents, Leslie Stephen and Julia Chadwick, had children from their first marriages when, as bereaved spouses they married and had four more. Vanessa and Virginia were the oldest, followed by two brothers. For the first thirteen years of Virginia's life, until her mother died, she spent every summer in St. Ives, in Talland House, with a view of the Godrevy Lighthouse. She wrote in 1939 in "A Sketch of the Past," of this childhood memory of lying in bed in the nursery:

Hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach, and then breaking one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind.

It's quoted at the beginning of a very good essay by the curator of the exhibition, Laura Smith, in Pallant House's magazine for May to October.

The holidays ceased with Julia's death and it was ten years later, after their father died, before Virginia and Vanessa returned to St. Ives. But you can see how much those long Cornish summers had on both their lives' work. Virginia described it as "the best beginning conceivable."

I wanted to see that lighthouse, waves on the beach and all but the closest you get (apart from the Laura Knight) is Frances Hodgkins' Wings over Water (1930) and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham's Rocks, St. Mary's Scilly Isles (1953). Perhaps I am just too literal.

If Virginia Woolf gave women one undying concept it is that of "A Room of One's Own," symbolising financial independence and intellectual freedom. As Laura Clark says, "the room becomes a metaphor for autonomy and choice within patriarchal limits, a sort of reclamation of the room's function to contain. Landscape, however, becomes a metaphor for freedom and power beyond existing culture."

Hence, landscape seen through the window of a room combines both these important concepts. The only flaw with this beguiling theory is that many, many male painters use the same image.

Some of the women artists in this exhibition are associated with dominant males, unlikely Woolf herself.

Dora Carrington

Carrington is for ever associated with her passion for Lytton Strachey. In spite of her affairs with both men and women and her marriage to Ralph Partridge, Strachey was the love of her life and she shot herself two months after his death, feeling there was no further point to her life.

Carrington and Strachey at Ham Spray

She was at least known by Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf writing of her in her diary: "She is odd from her mixture of impulse & self consciousness. I wonder sometimes what she’s at: so eager to please, conciliatory, restless, & active.... [B]ut she is such a bustling eager creature, so red & solid, & at the same time inquisitive, that one can’t help liking her."

It's hard exactly to see how Carrington was "inspired" by Virginia Woolf's writings.

Another woman artist overshadowed by a man is Gwen John, in her case, her much-admired younger brother Augustus.

Gwen John Self-portrait (1902)

It wasn't Augustus' fault: he acknowledged her greater talent and said that in time she would be valued more highly than him. But in their lifetimes her work was seen as "quiet" (I can hear women, particularly women writers, sighing).

So, if Virginia Woolf were alive today and visited this exhibition, would she recognise any of her ideas? She would certainly know some of the names though other later artists shown include Ithell Colquoun, Gluck and Romaine Brooks. But she was a very stringent critic of others' work and a perfectionist about her own. And there is a lot of very inferior stuff in this exhibition.

As I was writing this post, an email came from the Management Committee of the Society of Authors, embargoed till the next day, which is now past, so I can tell you all about it. You have probably all read it in the press by now anyway.

It was the results of the latest ALCS survey on authors' earnings. It was not a well-designed questionnaire, as I can attest, having filled it in myself, but the results show that such earnings have dropped from £11K in 2013, at the time of the last survey, to £10,500 per annum. In 2005 it was £12,500. To tease this out, average earnings are down by 42% on 2005 and 15% on 2013. It is well below the minimum wage.

Only 13.7% of writers can now make a living from this and no other work. And women get 75% less than men who write.

So how many of us can afford that room of our own in which to write freely without financial worry about how to pay for it? What would Virginia say? It's all very well being inspired by her writing but where does that get us if we don't have the freedom to act upon our ideas?

(All photos Wikimedia Commons)

PS: If your views of Virginia Woolf are not TOO respectful, may I recommend my friend Sue Limb's sublimely funny radio 4 series Gloomsbury?

The Sixties, that is. I don't think it really hit me that the 1960s now count as history until I saw Angela Davis on Channel 4 News and realised it was part of a feature on 1968 and that was fifty years ago.

We have debated often on this blog what constitutes "history;" is it a generation ago, 25 or 30 years? Well 50 years certainly counts and this decade in my life was a momentous one on the national stage. In particular it was the time when young people became what is now called "woke" and social protest became effective, long before there were any social media to support it and help it spread.

As Angela Davis said, "I couldn't afford international phone calls – I had to write letters." (For those of you who don't know or can't remember who she is we'll get to her later on). Here is a snapshot both public and personal of the years about which it was said "if you can remember [them] then you weren't there."

It was the era of the Cold War, Apartheid, the Berlin Wall, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the Vietnam War and the reign of the Kray twins in London. It was also the time of the Beatles, flower power, psychodelia, the moon landing, the Civil Rights movement and the beginning of second wave feminism.

At the beginning of the decade my boyfriend was Roger Rees, who went on to become a huge star of stage and screen, living with a male partner for 34 years. (RIP, lovely Roger). Briefly in the middle I dated Roger Scruton and smoked pot (unconnected, though it would be a sort of explanation). Two months before the sixties ended I met the man I married three years later. Being neither gay nor Tory, he suits me very well.

1960 The Sharpeville Massacre opened the eyes of the rest of the world to what was going on in South Africa. For years and tears, till the end of Apartheid, we bought no South African fruit and veg. Harold MacMillan made his "Winds of change speech," To Kill a Mockingbird was published and in London there was the obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover. How well I remember the copy being passed round at school which fell open at the rude bits. When I read the whole novel I found it disappointingly dull.

1961 Charismatic and (relatively) young John F. Kennedy became President of the United States.

I can't honestly say I remember his election or inauguration but I remember the night of his assassination two and a half years later very well. My older sister and I were babysitting a friend's 8-months-old son and he would not sleep. Surely everyone who was alive and beyond babyhood then remembers that night? And I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 too. It was the period that shaped the consciousness of those who were young in the 60s. We really believed that WW3 was imminent and we were all going to die.

In the early 60s I joined CND, while I was still a schoolgirl.

1961 The Berlin Wall was erected as the effective division between not just the city but East and West Germany. I was amazed to discover it was as recent as that when researching my novel When she was Bad (written as Amy Lovell).

Catch-22 and The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie were published. The Beatles first played the Cavern Club though, as a Londoner, I had yet to hear of them. I fell in love in Spain with an English boy called Tony but omitted to discover his surname and his parents whisked him away before we could exchange addresses. He had a twin sister called Tina. The trial of Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem.

1962 The Cuban Missile crisis was in October/November. Earlier in the year Fonteyn and Nureyev first danced together and I was besotted with him (ever since his defection to Paris the year before and his arrival in the UK). I heard about Marilyn Monroe's death while I was on holiday with my parents in Spain. Max Perutz won the Nobel prize for Chemistry, which I didn't pay much attention to at the time, but I later met him In Cambridge as his daughter was a friend.

1963 Please, Please Me, introduced me to the Beatles and in particular George Harrison. The Bell Jar was published but I didn't read it till a year or two later. And Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, though it took a while for feminism to reach these shores. Martin Luther King made his "I have a dream" speech and, on St. Cecilia's Day, JFK was assassinated in Dallas (see above). I don't think we knew if we were on the verge of something wonderful or something terrible. I'm still not sure.

"los Beatles" in Madrid

1964 The Civil Rights Act was signed by LBJ, though begun by JFK and his legacy. Another set of three initial, MLK, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The death penalty was at last abolished in the UK – another fact that surprised me with its lateness when I researched When she was Bad.

1965 Malcolm X was assassinated. T S Eliot died a more peaceful death but I was sad to see him go. The bombing of North Vietnam by the US and South Vietnam intensified, though I don't think I knew about it then, not till much later in 1967/68. I certainly didn't know about the marches to Montgomery now well-known from the film Selma. I spent the summer in Florence, determining much of the rest of my life. I'll be there again in a week's time. The Race Relations Act was passed in the UK.

1966 The demonstrations against the Vietnam War really picked up in the US, where I spent the summer but I'm ashamed to say they didn't feature in my awareness. I was living in a flat in NYC on the Upper East Side, wearing clothes bought in Carnaby Street ad eating Euphrates crackers with Philadelphia cheese and ground pepper, living a life incomprehensible to my parents.

I took more notice of the conviction of the Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley and the disaster in Aberfan that killed over a hundred children. And hearing about the flood in Florence that destroyed or damaged so much art. Never dreaming that fifty years later I would be writing about it in in an App on Michelangelo.*

1967 Elvis Presley got married! If this had happened a few years earlier, I would have been devastated. At the age of fourteen, I had decided he would marry me. And indeed he did meet Priscilla when she was about that age, so it wasn't quite as delusional as some of my crushes. (OK, it was still delusional). But now I was older and wiser and graduated a month after this seismic event. It was followed by the "Summer of Love," which wasn't for me, though I loved the dresses and the music and the pacifism.

1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated and Bobby Kennedy, who had been going to run for President, was killed two months later. This was when I really became aware of what was happening in Vietnam, appalled by the pictures in the newspapers. I started a Postgrad linguistics course at UCL, taught be Michael Halliday, who died a few weeks ago. This was another profound influence on the direction my life would take.

Angela Davis in the middle

Angela Davis was a Black activist and feminist who we were just about to hear about in the UK, though she wasn't arrested till the following year. Her stencilled face with its distinctive Afro hair appeared on walls in the UK. (She was found not guilty and has had a distinguished academic career). She is still an activist.

In France, "les evènements," the student riots, took place in Paris and beyond, protesting against capitalism, consumerism and American influence. They were accompanied by national strikes.

Czechoslovakia was invaded by the USSR. We had Czech students stranded at UCL and I remember vividly the marches, occupations and the fundraising Czech Appeal to help students cut off from families and finds.

1969 Richard Nixon became President of the United States. The Charles Manson "family" murdered Sharon Tate and four others and two more people the next day. The murders seemed even more horrific because Tate was eight months pregnant. She was married to Roman Polanski.

The Beatles gave a last impromptu performance together on a rooftop. Monty Python got its first TV airing. My sister and I stayed up late to watch the moon landing. It was her birthday, a fact that neither of us remembered later until reminded. It kept being delayed so we set an alarm and got up again in the early hours to watch it.

I moved into my first flat in London in Swiss Cottage, sharing with two others. Became a vegetarian. And at a Halloween party in Roehampton met my husband-to-be.

So those were the 60s, those were, remarkable in so many ways but viewed through the eyes of a teenager turning into an adult, a girl who had crushes on public figures and boys she met in real life, turning into a woman with a degree, some knowledge and and a serious relationship. What began as a sort of Adriana Mole view of the world turned to a commitment to civil rights, pacifism, feminism and socialism. When my first book was published in 1975, my publisher Rex Collings said drily, "I don't think we'll put on the jacket flap that you are a vegetarian, feminist, socialist" and he was probably right. But I am all those things and my views were formed in the decade I do remember, in spite of the pot. And I was there.

* Buried Alive: the Secret Michelangelo took to his grave, is an App created by Time Traveler Tours & Tales and can be downloaded for free on to iPhones and Android devices.

When she was Bad by Amy Lovell is published by the Greystones Press and available in paperback and on Kindle.

All photos are from Wikimedia Commons
(The montage at the top of the page is by Vitek - the images are:

ABC NET

Four Queens and a Countess - Review by Mary Hoffman

The history books that made me by Mary Hoffman

Rodin and the Greeks by Mary Hoffman

A Room of someone else's by Mary Hoffman

I do remember them and I was there by Mary Hoffman

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