by Merryn Allingham | Jan 21, 2019 | Uncategorized
The capital city of Turkey has been the centre of one of the most powerful empires in history: first as Byzantium, then Constantinople and finally Istanbul. Most of the many palaces in Istanbul are from the Ottoman period and in A Tale of Two Sisters I mention three...
by Merryn Allingham | Jan 21, 2019 | Uncategorized
The slave system in the Ottoman Empire was very different from that of plantation life in the US and the Caribbean. Males could be either military or domestic slaves and females almost always domestic. Within the gender segregation, there was a racial hierarchy at...
by Merryn Allingham | Jan 21, 2019 | Latest Book 3
In the early years of the twentieth century, the period in which A Tale of Two Sisters is set, a stereotype persisted in Europe that Turkish wives were slaves and chattels. The truth,...
by Merryn Allingham | Nov 28, 2017 | Uncategorized
It has been said that the British Empire was picked up in a ‘fit of absence of mind’. The speaker may well have been thinking of India, the country coming gradually under British rule, not by the efforts of Britain’s government but by those of the British East India...
by Merryn Allingham | Nov 28, 2017 | Uncategorized
The caricature of the Englishman in India is familiar from countless films and TV dramas – a narrow-minded sahib, disdainful of India’s people and its culture. But that stereotype belies a much richer history which reaches back centuries. The India of the East India...
by Merryn Allingham | Nov 27, 2017 | Uncategorized
The Indian Army was a separate organisation to the British Army, its main task being to police the Indian Empire. It came into being in 1895 when the three armies of the Presidencies of Bombay, Madras and Bengal, unified into a single army. Besides maintaining the...
by Merryn Allingham | Nov 27, 2017 | Uncategorized
Civil registration of births and marriages was first proposed by Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s, but the church was such a powerful entity at the time that it took on the role of recording baptisms and marriages in local Parish Registers. It wasn’t until 1837 that a...
by Merryn Allingham | Nov 27, 2017 | Uncategorized
Daisy Driscoll, the heroine of The Officer’s Wife, is brought up in an East End orphanage. She remembers it as a lonely and unhappy place and that is the image many of us still carry in our minds – that of a bleak Dickensian establishment. Nineteenth century...
by Merryn Allingham | Nov 27, 2017 | Uncategorized
So why an article on Highgate Cemetery amid all the Second World War and Indian material in Behind the Scenes? Simply that the place features heavily in the second book of the Daisy Driscoll trilogy. The oldest part of the cemetery was a place I visited several years...
