Lucy Worsley at Durham Book Festival 2011

Why did the flushing toilet take two centuries to catch on? Why did medieval people sleep sitting up? Why, for centuries, did people fear fruit? All these questions are answered in Lucy Worsley’s If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home, which looks at how people really lived through the architectural study of the rooms they lived in. Lucy Worsley is chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the body that looks after the Tower of London and Kew Gardens. This book accompanies her acclaimed television series for the BBC.