Claire Gervat's website

Claire Gervat

Introduction

Photograph: Mark Bottomley

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’
LP Hartley, The Go-Between

Travel writing and historical biography may not be obvious complements but, as LP Hartley memorably pointed out, there is a great deal of common ground between places that are far away in either time or distance. Conveying the atmosphere – the smells, sounds and sights – of an island on the other side of the globe, for instance, is much the same in many ways as breathing life into long-dead people and events of hundreds of years ago.
Of course, I didn’t start my working life thinking, ‘I know, I’ll do history and travel writing.’ In fact, my first career – all four years of it – wasn’t writing at all, but working in a City trading room, an experience I later drew on for a series of humorous columns in the Independent (which ran, appropriately enough, for four years). Only then did I come to my senses and launch myself into journalism, first on the production side and later taking up feature writing. A year off to travel round India and the Far East turned my pen in the direction of travel writing, and that was that.
Almost. I had read history at university (‘modern history’, it was called at Oxford, but only to distinguish it from ‘ancient history’), but had barely given it a thought since as a career option. However, life has a way of coming full circle. Hankering after the chance to write something longer than 2,500 words – and that’s pretty long for a travel article – I was lucky enough to have some inspiring encounters with editors, book authors and manuscripts. One thing led to another, in this case the chance to write about one of the 18th-century’s most enjoyably scandalous figures. What followed was several happy years combining the pleasures of travel journalism with trawling in dusty, far-flung archives and deciphering spindly handwriting.
As for a sequel, well, watch this space...