About me

I am Canadian and live in north London.  I am thrilled to have finally completed The Education of Girls, the story of  four years at Wellesley College during the tumultuous years of the late 1960s.  It was conceived during the pandemic on long Zoom calls with my three dear friends from that time. We shared letters and diaries and photographs and memories, and without them, this story would never have been written.

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 My first story was published in the Guardian when I was twenty-one. I went on to specialise in writing on environment and architecture.  In 1979, I moved to Hong Kong where I reported for the South China Morning Post, Asian Wall Street Journal and UK newspapers and magazines.

 

Out of that stay came the commission to write Hongkong Bank, the inside story of building Norman Foster’s ground-breaking headquarters for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. This was followed by Docklands in 1993.

 

By this time perestroika had come to Russia, and I was free to travel to Siberia to uncover the truth of my grandmother’s role in the Russian revolution. Researching and writing Olga’s Story, so close to my heart,  took ten years. Running the Show, Governors of the British Empire, was inspired by the discovering of an 1879 questionnaire that revealed the extraordinary variety of conditions under which British governors and their families lived around the world. ​