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Waiting for a train at Waterloo last Saturday, I thought of the scene in Hardy’s short story The Fiddler of the Reels which gave me the idea for my new novel ‘Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium’ in the first place. In it a Wessex man waits for his girlfriend to arrive at Waterloo on a Great Exhibition ‘special’ from Dorchester. “The seats for the humbler class of travellers,” […]

I imagine most of the male characters in my new novel ‘Mr Blackwood’s Fabularium’ to be wearing top hats. The fact that top hats retained their popularity for so long is odd. In the eighteenth century men wore tricorn hats, which are said to have been the most aerodynamically efficient hats ever designed. (The harder the wind blew, the more it jammed the hat down […]