Our Authors

Peter Broadbent

Peter Broadbent joined the Royal Navy as a 15-year-old Junior Seaman. After a successful naval career, he worked in marine facilities around the world. In 2001 he moved to a mountain village in the Valencia region of Spain where, along with his wife Margaret, he started a small community magazine that, over a period of five years, grew to become one of the most popular 'revistas' on the Costa Blanca. His witty and entertaining account of his time as a Junior Seaman is told in HMS Ganges Days, published by Chaplin Books (July 2012). He is currently working on two sequels: a memoir of being an Ordinary Seaman in HMS Bermuda, and then as a maturing Able Seaman let loose in the weird and wonderful back alleys of Singapore, Hong Kong, Sandakan, Lahad Datu and Kota Kinabalu during the Malaysian crisis of 1962-64.

Read an interview with Peter Broadbent in Issue No. 2 of Inside Story

Mark Browning

After receiving a First Class English degree at Manchester University, Mark Browning attended universities in Leeds, London and Kent and gained a PGCE, an MA and a PhD respectively. He has taught English and Film Studies in a number of schools in England and was a senior lecturer in Education at Bath Spa University. His previous books include David Cronenberg: Author or Filmmaker? and Stephen King on the Big Screen (both for Intellect), and David Fincher: Movies that Scar (for ABC CLIO).

He now lives and works as a teacher and freelance writer in Germany. His book, Danny Boyle: Lust For Life, was published by Chaplin Books in 2011.

John Bull

John Bull was born in 1935. He grew up in Gosport, Hampshire, and trained as a reporter on the Portsmouth Evening News. His subsequent provincial newspaper career included stints for the South London Press, where Battersea was his 'beat' area; the Bath Chronicle; and the Southern Evening Echo in Southampton. He worked in Paris, for the Associated French Press, before moving to Fleet Street where he wrote the John Field column for the News of the World (with a weekly readership of more than 12 million), and worked as a sub-editor on the Daily Mirror. His skills as a newspaper 'doctor', turning around failing papers and putting them back on the road to success, have been called on many times, most notably when he became editor of Sunday Sport in the 1980s.

His memoirs, The Night They Blitzed The Ritz and The Smile on the Face of the Pig are both published by Chaplin Books.

Bert Cardullo

Bert Cardullo is Professor of Media and Communication at the Izmir University of Economics in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in film history, theory, and criticism as well as popular culture. The author of many essays and articles over the years, he has had his work appear in such journals as the Yale Review, Cambridge Quarterly, Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, and Modern Drama. For 20 years, from 1987 to 2007, he was the regular film critic for the Hudson Review in New York. Cardullo is the author, editor, or translator of a number of books, the most notable of which are Soundings on Cinema: Speaking to Film and Film Artists, Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1890-1950: A Critical Anthology, and In Search of Cinema: Writings on International Film Art. He took his master's and doctoral degrees from Yale University, and received his BA, with honours, from the University of Florida.

Bert Cardullo's Interviews with Eric Rohmer and his book of film essays, Regarding the Cinema, were published by Chaplin Books in 2012.

James Christie

James Christie, born in 1964, has a degree in creative writing and a postgraduate diploma in library and information studies. He catalogued the private library of a stately home and worked as a law librarian for some years in Glasgow. In 2002 he was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome and shortly thereafter began to take a focused interest in Drusilla the vampire, a character in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He wrote a trilogy of fan-fiction stories (Drusilla's Roses, Drusilla's Redemption and Drusilla Revenant) which further developed the character of Drusilla.

In 2010, James took a Buffy-themed Greyhound bus trip across America with the support of the National Autistic Society Scotland, the story of which, together with descriptions of his difficulties living as an autistic adult in a neuro-typical world, was published by Chaplin Books under the title Dear Miss Landau in 2012.

Read an interview with James Christie in Issue No. 1 of Inside Story

Amanda J Field

Amanda Field, author of England’s Secret Weapon, is a film historian who specialises in the classic 'studio era' of Hollywood. She studied art history at Winchester School of Art and took her Masters in Film Studies at the University of Southampton, where she completed her doctorate in 2009. Before embarking on academic study, she had a long career in corporate communications producing publications for blue-chip organisations including IBM, Vodafone, The Science Museum and British Gas. She is a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London and for five years was a volunteer at at Portsmouth Museum where she helped catalogue the world's largest collection of Sherlock Holmes material.

She is currently researching boxing films of the 1930s and 1940s, for her book Sucker Punch which will be published by Chaplin Books in 2013.

Read an interview with Amanda J Field in Issue No. 2 of Inside Story

Patricia Malcolmson

Patricia Malcolmson is a social historian with a special interest in everyday life. Her first book, English Laundresses: A Social History, 1850-1930 (1986), has been followed in recent years by published editions (with Robert Malcolmson) of a number of diaries written during World War Two, most of which are held in the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex. She has also co-edited three books based on the voluminous Mass Observation diaries of Nella Last, 'Housewife, 49' of television fame: Nella Last's Peace (2008), Nella Last in the 1950s (2010), and The Diaries of Nella Last: Writing in War and Peace (2012), all published by Profile Books. She is currently working on a history of the wartime Women's Voluntary Services. Her book, Me and My Hair: A Social History, explores a subject of interest to almost every woman and is published by Chaplin Books (October 2012). She skis, enjoys the theatre, and lives in Nelson, British Columbia, Canada.

Jacqueline Percival

Since the 1970s Jacqueline has been collecting books on housekeeping, thrifty cookery, etiquette and servants, as well as women's magazines, and these now form a comprehensive collection of primary sources dating from the 1850s to the 1960s. She drew on this collection to write her first book, Breadcrumbs and Banana Skins: The Birth of Thrift, published in 2010, and Elbow Grease, a light-hearted look at how our grandmothers and great-grandmothers kept house, which was published by Chaplin Books in 2011. Jacqueline also runs a thriving internet-based book-selling business, Silverhands Books.

Malcolm Philips

Malcolm Philips became a local government employee in 1967, and was immediately struck by the curiosities and oddities he encountered, some of which form the background to his book Jobsworth - Confessions of the Man from the Council (published by Chaplin Books in 2013). Humour, he discovered, was the only antidote to the terminal frustration of life in the public sector. He survived in the business for over 20 years before leaving to take up an equally questionable role as a training consultant, during which time he served a wide variety of industries from heavy engineering to civil aviation, and from construction to the law. Malcolm now lives in south west France, where he is gradually getting to grips with some of the eccentricities and opacity of French public service.

Derek Phillips

Derek Phillips, the compiler of The Wonder of Woolies, is a retired civil servant who worked in electrical engineering and aircraft logistics attached to the Royal Navy. He is the author of 10 books on steam railways, an enthusiasm that began when as a teenager he became a locomotive fireman at Yeovil Town engine shed.

George Porter

George Porter was born in Liverpool in 1943. At fourteen he joined the Army as a boy soldier and subsequently served in Germany, the Persian Gulf, and Norway. After leaving the Army, he went first into the music publishing industry, eventually forming his own publishing/recording company, and then into magazine publishing. He has a combined honours degree in English and History from Ruskin University Cambridge and has a keen interest in the origins of Ancient Greek literature. He spent three years in Nigeria working on an adult literacy project for the British Council where he travelled the length and breadth of the country meeting and working with the many different peoples, of whom the Fulani nomads further influenced his contention that western civilization owes a great deal more to Africa than has ever been attributed. His play, Black Antigone, a new interpretation of Sophocles' tragedy, was published by Chaplin Books in 2012.

Françoise Schiltz

Dr Françoise Schiltz, author of The Future Revisited: Jules Verne on Screen in 1950s America is originally from Luxembourg and now lives in London. She studied English Literature at the University of Kent and went on to do a PhD in film studies at the University of Southampton.

Stephen Wade

Stephen Wade was born in Leeds and started his undistinguished football career there, playing for two struggling Sunday League teams; he made their struggling more dire and desperate than ever. Then this nippy winger morphed into a stopper for his 'North Kinley' team in Scunthorpe. His formative years included watching the great John Charles on the pitch and being inspired to write poetry in his evening classes at Park Lane College.

He is the author of over 30 books, mainly in the fields of biography and crime history. Passion for the Park, published by Chaplin Books (June 2012), is a memoir of his amateur football days and about his 20 years as a teacher, delivering the joys of English Literature to adult students.