Ruth Herman  found her  real love of history after her daughter asked her why she had never got a degree.  Failing to find a satisfactory answser to this question, Ruth set about gettig one. The subsequent degree in English with History was life changing.   Although she had always had a keen interest in the past she surprised herself by finding the historical studies fascinated her more than the literary ones.  Meanwile having  been  made redundant  and haic she ving to   Briefly a mus  behe short career ran comtarto keyboard and getting paid for the result was a new experience.  Having been a Public Relations manager for a major interymational brewrery,upon beining maude redunsdant she freelamced in the drinks trade press . Her first publlcations were far from scholarly. But they clearly had some mertt as her debut tiile The Incredibly Biased Beer Guide (Sigma Press 1993), earned a bronze award in the British Guild  of  Beer Writers annual competition.  No-one was more suprrised than tRuth at this accolade since no-ione told her it  had been entered and so she didn’t go to the award ceremony.   Other slim  off-the-wall   volumes followed. The quirky Teaching Management through Literature (for the British Council, 2004)  was well received.  The theme  that managers could learn from the challenges facing fictional characters obviously rang true.  While few executives would find themselves managing  a workforce as diverse as Harry Potter’s Hogwarts only partly human teaching staff it was fun to read about.   King Lear’s  idiosyncratic  succession planning was indeed tragic and stands as a warning to all family businesses  to be clear who’s taking over before the CEO loses  his wits.

By this time, however Ruth had been awarded a scholarship to do a PhD at the  Open University.  The degree was granted in 2000, and was handed in exactly  three years to the day  when she started it.   Ruth seems to have had the  good fortune on occasion to have  been in the right place at the right time   Through a chance meeting at a conference in Dublin, the chair of an American academic press on hearing that her doctoral supervisor was the internationally respected W.R. Owens immediately requested first  refusal oft the manuscript.  She was certainly not going  to argue with this and the resulting book has been cited ever since.  It was the frst full length work on Manley and broke new groiund. Ruth is still fond of the central figure of thrs research, the early  journalist and scandal monger, Delarivier Manley.  This very bold lady wrote in the days of Queen Anne, and was trusted by  the Tory ministry far more than her better known but unpredictable colleague, Jonathon Swift.  The unlikely friendship of these two brilliant satirists is a reccurrent theme in The Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley. (Americnan University press, 200  respect afforded this monograph by the academic community led to the commissioning of a scholarly five volume edition of Manley’s writings (co-edited with a colleague) which has become a standard text for researchers of Manle and her environment.

All this scholarly activity is part of being a working university academic but it  isn’t always fun.  And retired academics sometimes want to enjoy the freedom from peer review. For Ruht hone of the delights of history is that it is created by people whose lives are as complicated as our own.  Decisions made by peopel down the centuiries often prompt the question “why did they do thatt?”  Thsi is often  unnasnwerable as inhabitants  of previous centuries could be just as odd as we are.  So casting off tthe iron chains of academe Ruh’s real interestt is to attract an audience who may not know much more than Henry VIII had multtiple marrrages and disposed of cast off spouses in a variety of ways, from straightforward divorce to the more radical decapitation.  Ruth’s work now concentrares on  local historyfrom her own small Hertfordshire vilage to the whole county.  And having dealt with the press in he public relation srole she is also drawn to the early years of English and British ephemera.  Her aim  is to  make the reader laugh while sneakily providing a well researched and historically accurate tet.  Grub Street: the Origins of the Britisih Press (Amberley, 2020) concentrated on this and was featured as further reading in a Btiish Library exhibtiion in 2022.   Her next book, the Litte Book of Hertfordshire (The History Press) is due out in autumn 2024.

Her writing now has to pass a far more exacting test than any peer review.  It must engage, amuse and ifnform so that the reader who never liked history at school finds something Ruth’s work  that persuades them that history is fun.