I love history and studying the past. My first college degree was an English and History combination, and I seriously considered doing a history MA afterwards, but my love of English triumphed and I pursued a MA in that subject instead. So, I tend to continue to read a lot of history, which is pretty much a necessity for research for stories, but it’s also a pleasure. Reading about people’s lives in the past reminds me how vibrant individual people were, and how even ‘ordinary’ people could achieve extraordinary goals. There is a tendency among some depictions of the past (film is the worst for this) to portray people as…