'A major achievement' Ronald Blythe, author of AkenfieldA Cotswold vicarage.A former girls' boarding school in Surrey.A Jacobean house now buried in inner London.Three Houses, Many Lives tells the stories not only of the houses themselves but of the lives of the many people who lived in them. From Eugenia Stanhope who sold Lord Chesterfield's scandalous letters, to the autocratic vicar who held the same parish from age 28 to 82, from the just-literate wife of a parish clerk who wrote riddles in his registers, to the cow-keeper who farmed 226 acres in Hornsey till he sold them profitably when the railways came through. Gillian Tindall is a master of miniaturist history, making a particular place, person or situation stand for a much larger picture.

Newly opened by Queen Elizabeth II herself, discover the history and secret stories of the people who've lived above London's newest trainline.Crossrail, or the 'Elizabeth' line, is just the latest way of traversing the very old east-west route through the former countryside, into the capital, and out again. Throughout The Tunnel Through Time, renowned historian Gillian Tindall uncovers the lives of those who walked this ancient path. These people spoke the names of ancient farms, manors and slums that now belong to our squares and tube stations. Visiting Stepney, Liverpool Street, Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, Tindall traces the course of many of these historical journeys across time as well as space. 'Enchanting' Sunday Telegraph'Deftly weaves together archaeology, social history, politics, myth, religion and philosophy' The Times'Fully of lively vignettes' Spectator

*As read on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week*'A genius for a certain kind of social history that, in shining a light on one small place, illuminates a huge amount' Sunday TelegraphA toy train. A stack of letters. A tiny pulse glass, inherited from her great-great-grandfather, which was used to time a patient's heartbeat before pocket watches... Gillian Tindall, one of our most admired domestic history writers, examines seemingly humble objects to trace the personal and global memories stored within them, and re-animate the ghostly heartbeats of lost lives.'Elegiac... Tindall reflects on a lifetime's interest in historical recovery' The Telegraph'Tindall is a fine historian and writes with a wryness of everyday human foibles' The Times

London, that city of villages, has never been so vividly recounted as in this particular study of Kentish Town. Gillian Tindall takes us along the banks of London’s long-buried Fleet River, past wells and into public houses to reveal the real but fascinating history of its tenants, traders, freeholders and landlords. We watch as this village is absorbed by the metropolis and observe its desperate struggle to keep an identity, despite being fragmented by railways, bombed and developed. The Fields Beneath is one of a precious handful of books (like Montaillou and Akenfield) that in their precise examination of a particular locality open our understanding of universal themes, as if the microscopic examination of one place holds the key to a better understanding of the nature of community, and the role of the individual within it.

Unique book about the Left Bank and five generations of a family—all of whom left their footprints in the same narrow streets, and all of whom found refuge and rejuvenation in Paris.This unique and intensely involving book evokes the texture and atmosphere of a hidden Paris which has survived against all the odds of time and chance. Gillian Tindall is well known for her ability to breathe a passionate life into the generations of those who have walked this earth before us. Here, using a handful of lives and a specific location to exemplify 200 years of history, she focuses on a few of the oldest streets in Paris's Latin Quarter. Her study shows how Paris has drawn into its magnetic field people who have variously found there education or enlightenment, a refuge or a secret garden, even a different identity. Half a dozen individuals, all related in some way, reveal a web of human feeling and experiences across two centuries. There is the young doctor who walked all the...

Just across the River Thames from St Paul's Cathedral stands an old and elegant house. Over the course of almost 450 years the dwelling on this site has witnessed many changes. From its windows, people have watched the ferrymen carry Londoners to and from Shakespeare's Globe; they have gazed on the Great Fire; they have seen the countrified lanes of London's marshy south bank give way to a network of wharves, workshops and tenements - and then seen these, too, become dust and empty air.Rich with anecdote and colour, this fascinating book breathes life into the forgotten inhabitants of the house - the prosperous traders; an early film star; even some of London's numberless poor. In so doing it makes them stand for legions of others and for whole world that we have lost through hundreds of years of London's history.

Late on a summer afternoon in the very heart of rural France, in a small, centuries-old house newly abandoned to its ghosts, Gillian Tindall came upon a cache of letters dating from the 1860s. Neatly folded and carefully tucked away, all were addressed to the village innkeeper's daughter, Celestine. All but one were proposals of marriage. Celestine Chaumette (1844-1933) was to reject each of these suitors to wed another; yet she preserved the letters, keeping them throughout her long life. Something about the letters, about the woman who had so clearly cherished them, fired the historian's curiosity and the novelist's imagination. With a house in Chassignolles, Celestine's village, Ms. Tindall would spend years searching in dusty archives and farmhouse attics, probing the memories and myths of the men and women from the village and the surrounding countryside. The treasure she unearthed reaches far beyond the mystery of Celestine to tell of a vanished way of life, of a...