Description
Book Synopsis*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 Telegraph
A 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
Trade ReviewElegaic... Her books are carefully wrought acts of restoration... In
The Pulse Glass, Tindall, reflects on a lifetime's interest in historical recovery -- Francis Wilson * The Telegraph *
Tindall writes with affecting precision... Reading this book feels like looking out of the window on a long train journey. One is lulled by the rhythms into deep reflection and inexplicable nostalgia for the lives and landscapes of others -- Jessie Childs * History Today *Books of the Year* *
An excellent suite of essays on transience and remembrance... Gillian Tindall is a high-minded Autolycus, devoted not merely to snapping up the “unconsidered trifles” of past lives but holding them to the light to glean the stories they might conceal -- Anthony Quinn * Observer *
Tindall specialises in the overlooked, the underappreciated. She is very much a local historian, if you take that to mean that everything local can become universal; that the stories of ordinary people are as worth telling as the grand, the famous, the notorious... Tantalising... Tindall is a fine historian and writes with a wryness of everyday human foibles -- Emma Hogan * The Times *
Gillian Tindall has a richly furnished mind, as full of pigeonholes and secret drawers as an old-fashioned Victorian desk… Tapping at floorboards, exploring cellars, leafing through yellowing love letters…she unearths what she can about the worlds we have lost -- Christina Hardyment * Times Literary Supplement *
