I’m an author, broadcaster and travel writer. I love telling the stories of women who have been lost in history, such as my biographies Dickens’s Artistic Daughter Katey (about Kate Perugini, a wonderful portrait painter who has been unfairly forgotten today), The Mystery of Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s Rebellious Daughter (a very talented sculptor with a scandalous life) and Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel (Lizzie is usually remembered as a model, but was an artist in her own right), as well as March, Women, March: Voices of the Women’s Movement and Letters of Great Women. I’ve also written several books about my great great great grandfather, including Dickens and Travel, Charles Dickens and his Circle and Dickens and Christmas. My other titles include The Writer Abroad, in which I plundered the British Library’s archives to find travel writing through the centuries; Bitten by Witch Fever: Wallpaper and Arsenic in the Victorian Home (written with the National Archives); Elizabeth Revealed: 500 Facts and the Queen and Her World; and Moustaches, Whiskers & Beards, which tells the often bizarre story of facial hair in art.

You can also check out my Audible podcast, ‘The Real Sherlock’, a series about Arthur Conan-Doyle, and my interviews with fellow authors on The Goldster Podcast.

I’m available for media consultancy and interviewee work. My TV credits include Miriam’s Dickensian Christmas (which I co-created with Miriam Margolyes), Charles Dickens with Gyles Brandreth, World’s Greatest Paintings, A Very Country Christmas, Paul O’Grady’s Great British Escape, The Project (New Zealand), Landscape Artist of the Year, Queen Victoria and her Tragic Family, Cathedrals of Steam – Europe’s Most Famous Train Stations, Missing Masterpieces, Queen Victoria’s Children, Mrs Dickens’s Family Christmas, Dickens and Health, Find My Past: The Staplehurst Rail Crash, Charles Dickens’s Secret Lover and Charles Dickens and the Invention of Christmas.