Hello. Thanks for landing here. This website is waiting for a serious upgrade, but only once I’ve finished my next book. Hopefully in 2026. See you then!

My fifth book, Fabric, was published by Profile Books in November 2021 and Pegasus in the US the following years. It took more than five years. The countries I visited include Papua New Guinea, France, India, China, Scotland, Guatemala, the USA, Norway, Italy and Spain. And Thailand, where I was in the library in Bangkok’s wonderful Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles in the King’s Palace when suddenly everything went quiet and I realised I was the only reader there. I kept reading until the end of the day, but then the librarian arrived and said mysteriously that I had to go quickly. We snuck out, running through various back corridors in the labyrinth of public and private royal buildings, then through a tiny door and out into a rainstorm. I learned as I ran that all other visitors had left early to make space for an unscheduled royal visit, but that I’d looked so settled and intense in my reading about fabrics that they’d let me alone, asked somebody to mind me until I was done, and then let me out of a secret gate.

My fourth book A Brilliant History of Color in Art came out in November 2014. It was published by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and writing it involved living in Getty scholar accommodation for five weeks and going every day up the hill to the museum and its amazing attached library, the Getty Research Institute. It was commissioned as a book for teenagers, but also for adults. I finally worked out the structure after primary school students in Yorkshire wrote to me asking about the history of colours. They sent 20 questions and I answered most of them, and when they sent a thank you they suggested I write a book about paints for children. And I thought oh, that’s what I’m trying to do – but that question helped me realise how to do it. When it was published I went up to give a special talk to the class that inspired me. It has plenty of fantastic illustrations, many from the Getty itself.

The third book (and if somebody had a bet with me 10 years before that this would be the title of my third book, I’d have lost some money) was Faith in Conservation. I wrote it with my husband, Martin Palmer, and it was published by the World Bank in 2003. They said it was one of their best-sellers. The first five chapters are mostly his stories, and some of my own (e.g. the bedbugs were mine) They tell about starting this work with HRH Prince Philip, and how religions can really have a huge impact on environment work. You can buy the original from amazon, or you can download the pdf free of charge.

Jewels was my second book. I was interested in how some of the most precious items in the world are found by some of the poorest people. I visited Myanmar’s most historical ruby mines; the world’s biggest amber mining town in Russia which I learned was once a gulag; and went mining opals in the Australian outback. For me the most extraordinary journey was to the ancient emerald mines of Cleopatra. They can still be visited in the Egyptian desert but they are very remote. Before I went I had a crash course from Derbyshire cave explorers in going down abandoned mines (tips included wearing a hard hat, taking a spare battery, a spare of the spare and possibly even a spare of a spare of the spare, going down feet first if you were worried, taking a piece of string, labyrinth-style. And watching out for scorpions).

Colour (in the US, Color) was my first book, published in 2002. The first journey, to Chile, was made in 1999 when I was helping friends with a documentary on Pablo Neruda and I happened to bump, in the metro, into the man whose father had helped bring cochineal to Chile from Peru. This isn’t what started the book (that happened when I was eight, in a cathedral in France), but it is the coincidence that kicked me to actually write it rather than just dream about it. It involved seventeen journeys to places like Afghanistan, Iran and Mexico, as well as thousands of hours in libraries around the world. One of my favourite ones in memory is the Calcutta library with the fans lazily drifting above, and the smell of old paper and warm grass. My favourite in reality is the British Library. My husband says he is glad they close it at night, otherwise I would live there.