Author Bio
One of the reasons I am a historian and biographer is that other peoples' lives are more interesting than my own! I was born in Yorkshire and have lived here all my life, apart from five years spent at the University of Oxford. I married my childhood sweetheart (who was also at Oxford with me) and we returned to Yorkshire. For six years I was the curator and librarian of the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth, a job which made me realise that there was a vast amount of unpublished material available which would transform peoples' perceptions of that extraordinary family. I spent the next five years researching and writing my biography, The Brontës, followed by another five years devoted to Wordsworth: A Life. Returning to the medieval period, which I had studied at university, was a great joy and Agincourt was a gift of a subject. Although my work is a consuming passion (as my children often complain), my family is actually the most important part of my life. There, I told you it was boring!
For me, the most important web sites are always the ones that enable me to locate manuscripts in institutional holdings. The two best ones are www.a2a.org.uk which allows you to search through the catalogues of most of the major public and university archives in the UK, and www.nationalarchives.gov.uk, which is dedicated to the holdings of The National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office). Searches by subject on both these sites turned up previously unpublished manuscripts which I was able to use in Agincourt.
In retrospect it seems obvious that my favourite childhood reading has shaped my writing career. My love of medieval history, and knighthood and chivalry in particular, undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that from a very young age - I think as soon as I could read - I loved Arthurian romances: the best and most brilliant of these is T. H. White's The Once and Future King, a book which continues to hold me in thrall today. I also read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, swiftly followed by her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights and Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. Gaskell's wonderful book, as I later discovered, is more fiction than fact, but if you had asked me when I was thirteen what I wanted do, I would have said 'write a biography of the Brontës'. Several decades later, I did just that!