This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
The first thing to mention about this book was that it was not what I was expecting! I thought, from the blurb and the fact it had been shortlisted for a military literary award, that this would be a military story with a romance, but this is definitely a romance set during a war. Given this difference, it took me a while to get my head into the book There is a line in the book when Roseen observes how eager and enthused Kelly becomes when he is discussing the Navy, and Dawson's writing is exactly the same. The book springs to life as the campaigning starts and the account of the offensive against Copenhagen is handled skilfully and compassionately. The movements of the military machine were well-researched and the care taken to set the reader in that surrounding is commendable. I found most of the characters irritating to one degree or another - although this is not a criticism, as I have read plenty of great book with protagonists who annoy me! Roseen I found most annoying of al...