Dear Mr Cornwell I’m interested to note that someone recently asked whether you had considered writing about the Duke of Marlborough’s campaigns in the same way as you’ve written about Wellington’s campaigns through Sharpe and you said you had thought about it. I really hope you do because I’d love to learn about Marlborough as I’ve learnt about Wellington and I definitely don’t know of anyone else who’s done it. I recently thought about researching Marlborough and seeing if I can write about him myself but I’m working on a raher large project at the moment with at least one other planned in the future and I also realised that writing about historical battles is a lot harder than you make it appear! So I hope you will write about Marlborough one day. Then again I’m looking forward to more of the Uhtred story because I really enjoyed The Last Kingdom (I wish Ragnar hadn’t died though). I’m also hoping to see more of Rider Sandman one day and of course I can’t resist any future Sharpes! One of the really interesting things in The Last Kingdom is the historical note at the end – I thought the mention of your ancestors was particularly interesting. I think it always adds more interest to a subject if you know of a connection like that. If only we could all have ancestors with interesting history… One question – how does the AE in a name alter the pronunciation? One last thing, I wondered if you’d read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarfk, the story of two magicians in Regency era England? I really enjoyed this book though sadly there wasn’t as much about Strange assisting Wellington in his campaigns as I would have liked. Marie