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Gillian Tindall is a master of miniaturist history, well known for the quality of her writing and the scrupulousness of her research; she makes a handful of people, a few locations or a dramatic event stand for the much larger picture, as her seminal book The Fields Beneath, approached the history of Kentish Town, London. She has also written on London's Southbank (The House by the Thames), on southern English counties (Three Houses, Many Lives), and the Left Bank (Footprints in Paris), amongst other locations, as well as biography and prize-winning novels. Her latest book, The Tunnel through Time, traced the history of the Crossrail route, the forthcoming 'Elizabeth' line. She has lived in the same London house for over fifty years.
Wenceslaus who, you may ask? Yet it is largely thanks to Hollar that we know anything of what London looked like in the 17th century, before the Great Fire, for it was he who produced the etchings of Old Saint Paul's, the palace of Whitehall and the meadows (!) of Islington, old London Bridge crowded with timbered houses, the populous Thames flowing beneath, and of course his famous panorama of the city, seen from an imaginary high point on the South Bank. Yet the artist who preserved his adopted city in such enchanting detail left few traces of his own life. We know that he left his native Prague in the midst of the Thirty Years War, and sought refuge in an England on the brink of its own civil war (a war Hollar avoided by removing himself to the Low Countries, returning only after the execution of King Charles). For the rest, Gillian Tindall, acclaimed author of The Fields Beneath and City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay, draws on a range of sources and on her own imagination to create a montage of Hollar's life and times, and the illustrious lives (Samuel Pepys, John Tradescant, John Ogilby) that touched his. It is a carefully researched account, but Tindall also employs her considerable skills as a novelist to illuminate those areas of Hollar's life for which there are no records (a skill she has already used to effect in Celestine, her prize-winning novel of 19th-century rural life in France). The factual and fictional sections complement each other, forming an intricate whole, not unlike Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor in its baroque atmosphere and macabre (if understandable) accent on death and disease. A richly rewarding, multi-layered experience in which literature and history meet head-on. (Kirkus UK)
