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Antonia Hodgson is a freelance editor, and author of the bestselling Thomas Hawkins historical crime series. Her first novel, The Devil in the Marshalsea, won the CWA Historical Dagger Award and was shortlisted for the Theakston Crime Novel of the Year. She lives in Kent, England, where she has been visited by a fox and a raven, and a tiger in the form of her neighbour's ginger cat. No dragons as yet.
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Your first two novels are both set in London in the late 1720s. What drew you to this place and time?
I'd written a previous novel that didn't work out, but a small part of it was set in early Georgian London. It's such a lively, fascinating period and I couldn't understand why it had been so neglected, especially in fiction. London was the greatest city in the world at the time, with a population of over 600,000. There were pockets of elegance, but it was a filthy, drunken, chaotic place - with no police force. The English were fiercely protective and proud of their unique liberty: they had a constitutional monarchy, no standing army, no Censorship Act. Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin both lived in London in the 1720s - and the freedoms they witnessed certainly informed their revolutionary writings.
There was a very dark side to this society of course – including the rise of the slave trade and brutal punishments for minor crimes. And while it's easy to associate the age with fun-loving gin drinkers, in truth it was more like a crack epidemic. Gin - closer to poorly distilled moonshine than what we add to our martinis today – was in part responsible for the drop in life expectancy over this period.
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An amateur cook, Martine Bailey won the Merchant Gourmet Recipe Challenge and was a former UK Dessert Champion, cooking at Le Meurice in Paris. Her recipes have appeared in many publications including Good Housekeeping, Olive... (more)
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Miranda Carter was educated at St. Paul's Girls' School and Exeter College, Oxford. She worked as a publisher and journalist before beginning research on her biography of Anthony Blunt in 1994. She lives in London with her ... (more)
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