My second post as guest-editor of 'The Afterword' for Canada's National Post newspaper:

Like many authors I’m often asked for writerly advice, and my inclination is to defer to past masters where possible. In the last few years I’ve read a lot of 19th century biography as research for my novels, and I’ve just finished the marvellously-named George Frisbee Hoar’s Autobiography of Seventy Years, published in 1904. As well as being one of the most remarkable US politicians of his day, Hoar was a prominent antiquarian whose personal copy of Heinrich Schliemann’s Mycenae came into my possession as I was writing my novel The Mask of Troy ...