Jacky Colliss Harvey – författare

A New York Times bestseller, Red is the first book to explore the history of red hair and red-headedness throughout the world.With an obsessive fascination that is as contagious as it is compelling, Jacky Colliss Harvey explores red hair in the ancient world, the prejudice manifested against redheads across medieval Europe, and red hair during the Renaissance as both an indicator of Jewishness and the height of fashion in Protestant England, thanks to Elizabeth I.Colliss Harvey also examines depictions of red hair in art and literature, looks at modern medicine and the genetic decoding of redheads, and considers red hair in contemporary culture, from advertising to 'gingerism' and bullying.More than just a book for redheads, Red is a fascinating social and cultural celebration of a rich and mysterious genetic quirk.

Samuel Pepys walked round London for miles. The 2½ miles to Whitehall from his house near the Tower of London was accomplished on an almost daily basis, and so many of his professional conversations took place whilst walking that the streets became for him an alternative to his office.With Walking Pepys’s London, the reader will come to know life in London from the pavement up and see its streets  from the perspective of this renowned diarist. The city was almost as much a character in Pepys’s life as his family  or friends, and the book draws many parallels between his experience of 17th-century London and the lives of  Londoners today. Colliss Harvey’s new book reconstructs the sensory and emotional experience of the past, bringing geography, biography and history into one.Full of fascinating details and written with extraordinary sensitivity, Walking Pepys’s London is an unmissable exploration into the places that made the greatest English diarist of all time.

This is a book is about walking and writing; about walkers who wrote, and writers who walk. And because it is a book about walking and writing it is also a book about thinking, the circuit that exists between mind and feet, and about moving through a landscape that can be both physically in front of you, and exist in a line of words or the flight of a line of thought. And since all this walking and writing and thinking must have somewhere to take place, it is also a book about Suffolk, where I come from as a writer. So it also has a something in it of the journal, the writer's notebook; a little of the memoir and a little of the love-letter. You might call it the literary biography of a landscape.You may follow the walks on foot, with this book in your backpack perhaps, for those moments when walking must give way to reading, or you can follow them from within the deep comfort of a favourite armchair. You will travel in it from west to east, from chalk plain to crag; from velvety farmlands muffled by leaves to deafening shingle and uncompromising sea. You will be in excellent company - the walkers who will join you along the way range from Daniel Defoe and Robert Louis Stevenson to Patricia Highsmith, Maggie Hemingway, Rebecca Solnit and Noreen Masud. They will include the poets George Crabbe, Robert Bloomfield, Algernon Swinburne, Stevie Smith and Blake Morrison; the literary greats Wilkie Collins, George Orwell and W. G. Sebald, who found a new native land here; and those born to it, such as M. R. James and Edward Fitzgerald. All have their own thoughts, their own connections and reflections to add to the conversation. Let us walk.