A Traveller in Time

"It’s a magical book, it really is. I was so impressed. It is astoundingly well imagined and extraordinarily well researched. It is almost perfect. There are a couple of slight factual errors in there and in terms of accuracy, obviously what I was saying about cruelty you don’t have reflected in the details because it’s a children’s book. You couldn’t possibly reflect the horror things were for children in the late 16th century! It’s very lucid in the way it goes from the modern, to the 16th century, this girls goes to and fro seemingly without being able to control which period she’s living in. But the magic and the way she falls in love with the 16th century is so beautifully done, you cannot help but be carried away by it. I read it to my daughter two years ago, when she was ten, and it was such a privilege. We both could not get enough of it. Oh yes. One of the things I’m always at pains to emphasize is that history is not about the past, history is about people. If we want to understand people, we need to see them in different times from our own. We need to understand them over longer periods of time, or see them in extreme circumstances. We get a much better idea of what the human race is by looking at it over several hundred years, rather than just by looking at what it’s like today. A good example of this was a recent BBC opinion piece – a headline about how the young have never had it so bad. Well, as a historian, if you look back over the past 1000 years, frankly the youth have never had it so good as they’ve had it these past 30 years. Youth has never been treated well. If you go back a few decades it was treated pretty poorly, and if you go back to the pre-industrial period it was treated very poorly indeed. Good history is about people, not just about the past for the sake of it. This book is really bringing that to the fore. Because these are interesting people in extreme circumstances, because the book is so passionate about other people, it does deliver what these other great children’s books do."