Contemporary Authors

• A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life from the Stone Age to the Phone Age Thomas Dunne Books (New York, NY), 2016

• Greg Jenner - http://www.gregjenner.com/who-is-greg-jenner/

  WORK-RELATED CONTACTS FOR GREG JENNER:

  For TV, radio, public speaking bookings, please contact KNIGHT AYTON
  For literary & magazine enquiries, please contact Donald Winchester @ WATSON, LITTLE
  For Historical Consultancy for TV/Film, please contact Greg directly via info@gregjenner.com
  Greg Jenner is a British public historian with a particular interest in communicating history through pop culture. He is the Historical Consultant to all seven series of CBBC’s multi-award-winning Horrible Histories, being solely responsible for the factual accuracy of over 1,600 sketches and 100+ comedy songs, and is the author of A Million Years In A Day: A Curious History of Ordinary Life, From Stone Age To Phone Age, which is an entertaining romp through the evolution of our daily routines.

  Greg is a regular voice on national radio and podcasts. In 2015 he graduated to TV appearances as a panellist on BBC Two’s The Great History Quiz, alongside team captains Lucy Worsley and Dan Snow, and then as co-presenter on Inside Versailles (a 10-part historical companion piece to BBC Two’s lavish drama series Versailles). In June 2015 Greg guested on BBC Radio 4’s Museum of Curiosity, appearing on the panel with the veteran comedian Ken Dodd and the mathematician Dr Hannah Fry. This episode won Best Radio Talk Show at the European Rose D’Or Awards 2016.

  After studying at the University of York between 2001-5, Greg ran out of money and abandoned his plans for a PhD in Medieval Literature. Instead he has spent the past 12 years in the TV industry, working on an assortment of historical documentaries, dramas, comedies, and digital interactive projects for BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Discovery USA, History USA, and he has recently co-scripted the new TIME EXPLORERS digital app for Historic Royal Palaces’ schools educational programme. He is also currently acting as Historical Consultant to two major TV dramas in development.

  As a freelance writer, he contributed a few of his own songs and sketches to Horrible Histories, and he’s also scribbled lots of articles (click to read them for free) for BBC History Magazine, History Revealed Magazine, Britain Magazine, The Radio Times, and The Huffington Post.

  greg-and-lauren-laverne-september-8th-2016Greg Jenner has debated a government MP live on BBC Radio 5 Live, discussed the history curriculum on BBC’s Radio 4 and BBC1’s The Sunday Politics Show, and wore a VERY fetching purple jumper on BBC1 News with Huw Edwards to explain the implications of King Richard III’s discovery. Recent radio interviews include: BBC Radio 2 with Steve Wright and Simon Mayo, BBC Radio 5 Live with Danny Baker, BBC Radio 6 with Lauren Laverne, BBC Radio Scotland with Fred MacAuley, and Absolute Radio with Geoff Lloyd. He was also Chris Evans’ Not-So-Mystery Guest on BBC Radio 2’s Breakfast Show, in which he delivered a brief history of briefs (underpants) to the nation.

  Having also dabbled in writing and performing comedy, Greg made his solo stage debut at the Hackney Empire for Arts Emergency charity in 2013, has twice guested on the award-winning QI podcast No Such Thing As A Fish, and spent 9 bizarre hours on stage as part of Mark Watson’s 27 Hour Comedy Marathon for Comic Relief. He regularly gives public talks, and spoke to a sold out crowd of 950 people at Hay Festival 2015.

  Greg Jenner is both a passionate defenIPUPder and careful critic of the way in which the past is exploited by our society for entertainment. He teaches a Public History MA seminar at the University of York and Royal Holloway, University of London, and has also lectured in several universities on the philosophical and pragmatic problems of how historical television is made and consumed.

  He has silly hair and is horribly addicted to Twitter. You can follow him @greg_jenner. He also has a love/hate relationship with Spurs. Sorry about that.

• The Huffington Post - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/greg-jenner

  Greg Jenner
  Public Historian (co-host BBC2 'Inside Versailles', Historical Consultant, BBC 'Horrible Histories')
  Greg Jenner is the author of A Million Years In A Day: A Curious History of Daily Life, From The Stone Age To The Phone Age and is also Historical Consultant to CBBC’s Horrible Histories. He has spent the past 12 years making historical TV programmes, before which he studied History & Archaeology BA and Medieval Studies MA at York University. He has stupid hair.

• History Extra - http://www.historyextra.com/inspiringhistory/author-qas/greg-jenner

  Greg Jenner is the historical consultant on CBBC's multi-award winning Horrible Histories. He is also the author of A Million Years In A Day: A Curious History of Ordinary Life, From Stone Age To Phone Age (W&N, January 2015).

  Here, Jenner talks puns, metaphors and the importance of eating lunch...

  Q: What is your typical day as an author like?

  A: Thanks to a debilitating fusion of stubborn perfectionism, guilt complex and crippling self-doubt, I have evolved into a workaholic who is much too terrified of failure to not work all the time. So I write every day of the week, though I'll do 10 hours on Monday-Friday and half that at the weekends. However, though I am chained to my laptop throughout, I find my creativity is best stimulated by intense bursts of Twitter activity, probably every two or three hours, as this will inevitably lead me to some fascinating article, or a brilliant joke, which give me a fresh perspective on my own writing. This is the lie I tell myself, anyway!

  Usually I forget to have a proper lunch, and my wife will find me sprawled on the bed, laptop on my belly, with biscuit crumbs nestled in my beard. I’m quite sure she is regretting her life choices, but she’s too nice to say so. I’m not sure why I like writing in bed, but it somehow makes the whole endeavor feel pleasingly amateurish. The formality of an office can be off-putting sometimes, particularly when trying to write something funny. That said, I do have an office in my garden, and I will hibernate in there when a deadline looms, or when a particular chapter is proving to be an obstinate adversary.

  Q: How did you first get published?

  A: It helped I am the expert consultant to a successful TV show, Horrible Histories, but the truth is that I had to work hard for six months to get my book deal, and before that I was already developing my technique with funny history blogs for the Huffington Post.

  Blogging is unpaid, and it took up a fair bit of time, but it allowed me to find my voice, hone my style, and build an audience. They were also a useful portfolio to help me find my brilliant agent, Donald Winchester, and we then pitched my idea – what was then called From Stone Age To Phone Age – to various publishers.

  I was thrilled when Orion offered me a two-book deal, but I then had to knuckle down for a solid 18 months to deliver on my side of the bargain, and it was a steep learning curve going from short-form comedy blogs to crafting a 100,000-word book. I felt like a sprinter finding himself in a 10k endurance event. I had to learn to pace myself, and my writing. The end product, A Million Years In A Day, is a history book with a sense of humour, but the jokes are more cautiously spaced out, to help the history flow.

  Q: What is the secret to good writing?

  A: I have no idea. But this is what I have picked up from a lifetime of reading other people’s work… some of this might be right. Maybe.

  Don’t patronise your readers, but don’t assume they know as much as you. Language is beautiful in its variety; it is a bubbling cauldron of syllabic possibilities, so dip your ladle and scoop out tasty synonyms for oft-used words. But don’t tumble into esoteric pretention – only Wilf Self can get away with sentences that resemble a choking thesaurus being given the Heimlich manoeuvre.

  And while we’re on the subject, don’t vomit tautology over every sentence when one adjective will do. And feel free to start sentences with conjunctions, because that’s the kind of kickass maverick you are. Read George Orwell. Feel free to ignore his Six Rules of Writing, so long as you know why your version is better.

  Use metaphorical language, analogy, and simile – compose an image that floods the mind like a rolling tsunami of vivid meaning – but do so sparingly, for repetition can be dull. Avoid clichés like the plague, because at the end of the day, when all is said and done, and the clock strikes noon, and the chickens have all come home to roost (having been counted before they hatched), it turns out that all that glitters is not gold. But an oldie can be a goodie. So, yeah, whatever…

  Subvert language. Have funs with puns, and don’t be scared to MEsS AboUt with tHe RULeS. Vary your pace. Short, sharp sentences can be impactful.

  See?

  Long sentences can be rather joyful in their elastic span, particularly if you are building an idea that suggests timelessness, or vastness, or incomprehension at something that seems too great to take in; or even if you want to build momentum towards some higher plateau, or some dreadful crescendo, and you wish to convey the excitement, or frosty terror, of the mounting tension as the revelation looms into view, and… OH MY GOD, WHAT IS THAT??????!!!

  Listen to people chatting on the bus. Study dialogue and speech patterns. Steal everything from everyone, and hope they don’t notice. Be original. Get on Twitter and learn to be interesting in 140 characters or less. Decide if you are going to be militantly angry about the word ‘fewer’. Read voraciously, read everything – you can learn as much from crap writing as you can from literary genius. Enjoy your writing. Try and remember to eat lunch.

A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday
Life from the Stone Age to the Phone Age
Publishers Weekly.
263.17 (Apr. 25, 2016): p84.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life from the Stone Age to the Phone Age
Greg Jenner. St. Martin's/Dunne, $26.99 (368p) ISBN 978-1-250-08944-1
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Jenner, a cowriter of the BBC's Horrible Histories series, muses about the historical antecedents of activities on a typical British Saturday in this
entertaining work. He begins his day at 9:30 a.m. and proceeds to consider humans' historical and varied methods of dividing time, setting the
pattern for succeeding chapters. Over the course of the day, Jenner reflects on the keeping of pets, human communication technologies, clothing,
alcohol, dining, and even tooth-brushing. His extensive coverage of bodily functions in the chapter on "Answering the Call of Nature" may be a
bit much for some readers, but he shows that humans have done some fairly gross things in our past (see the section on bathing, for instance). The
2/1/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1485988911954 2/2
fact-checking isn't always flawless--for instance, Jenner credits Charles Wesley with the first utterance of "Cleanliness is next to godliness" rather
than his brother John--but this is a fun book, not a scholarly tome. His sources are also overwhelmingly Eurocentric, though he does include some
references to Asia and the Americas. Jenner's book is an amusing examination of what we humans do with ourselves all day. Agent: Donald
Winchester, Watson Little (U.K.). (June)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life from the Stone Age to the Phone Age." Publishers Weekly, 25 Apr. 2016, p. 84.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA450904609&it=r&asid=54412ba2e831f00c722fc220186769a0. Accessed 1 Feb.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A450904609

• The Telegraph
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/11627078/14-things-we-learned-from-Greg-Jenners-history-of-everyday-life.html
  Word count: 914

  14 things we learned from Greg Jenner’s history of everyday life
  Why did Socrates hate sausages? Who put libraries in their bathrooms? Which men wore corsets?

  By Alice Vincent, Arts Writer
  8:00AM BST 25 May 2015
  Greg Jenner has been unearthing the more bizarre aspects of the banal while writing his new book, A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life. He took to the stage of the Telegraph Tent during the Hay Festival to reveal the unusual histories of objects we all use every day. Here’s what we learned:
  1. The Romans didn’t have lavatory cubicles
  They may have had underfloor heating and enormous sewer systems but the forica, or public toilets, used by the Romans lacked one major thing: cubicles. Instead, it was totally acceptable for up to 30 people to go to the lavatory side-by-side – and then share the spongia, the ancient equivalent of toilet roll, by passing it from person to person.
  2. George Washington only had one tooth
  From the age of 22, the first President of the United States was left with a solo molar. Apparently, he lost the rest by “chomping on Brazil nuts”, according to Jenner. His contemporaries may not have realised it, as he wore fake teeth, but these caused him great pain, which he dealt with by dosing himself with opium.
  3. Tutankhamen was buried with loads of pants
  The Egyptian pharaoh was buried with nearly 145 shenti, or pairs of underwear.
  4. Plato invented the first alarm clock
  The ancient Greek philosopher created an alarm clock 2,400 years ago to get his students out of bed. It was a water clock, which measures time by a regulated flow of water. This in turn operated a water organ, which Plato used to signal morning lectures.
  5. Beds were invented 77,000 years ago - and were mosquito proof
  The oldest ever bed was found in a cave in South Africa and consisted of a series of mattresses woven from a particular plant that repelled insects - meaning it was possibly a natural malaria prevention.
  6. Victorian doctors believed parents could ‘suck the life-force from their children’
  With the dawn of the Victorian age came privacy, and sleeping a family of 14 into a bed, as had been the case in rural and poor families even until the beginning of the 20th century, was no longer acceptable. Contemporary doctors and thinkers at the time came up with incredible reasons why children, their parents, and even married couples shouldn’t share a bed.
  Some said that parents would suck out life-force from their children, like, as Jenner put it, “like a kind of wrinkled soul parasite who would scoop out vitality”. Victorians also thought that married couples would get a better night’s sleep if they slept alone, while some were convinced that one could contract disease from the sweat and bodily excretions from a night with a partner.
  7. Potatoes were thought to cause leprosy
  Now an essential part of people’s diets the world over, when potatoes were first introduced to the UK in the 1500s, people saw their lumpy, gnarly appearance and assumed they caused leprosy. It took 300 years for people to conquer fears that potatoes caused leprosy, flatulence and sexual arousal.
  8. Toilet paper took 1,000 years to reach the UK
  And then a few more decades for it to be splinter-free. The Chinese invented toilet paper in the ninth century, but it would take until the 19th century to become a fixture in British loos. An advert from 1935 promised a brave new world: toilet paper with no splinters!
  9. Men loved corsets in the 18th century
  Dandies and Macaronies wore more “shapewear” than the ladyfriends they were trying to attract: corsets to flatten their tummy, padding out their chest and buttocks to give them the desired silhouette.
  10. Charles Dickens was one of the first people to have a plumbed-in shower
  The Victorian author and celebrity was an early adopter of the shower when they first became a household luxury in the 1840s. It was known as ‘The Demon’ by his family, and Dickens used it with cold water, which he believed increased his manly powers.
  11. Some public baths were big enough to have two libraries
  The baths of Caracalla were double the size of a football pitch and housed two, presumably quite damp, libraries: one in Greek and one in Latin, to keep the 1600 bathers entertained.
  12. Socrates hated sausages
  The pig was domesticated about 6,000 years ago in China, and the fact that their meat was easy to salt and preserve meant that pork quickly became part of the staple diet for working and peasant classes. Romans loved bacon, but they were less keen on sausages, deeming them barbarian food. Socrates suspected that sausages were more “pooch than pig”, according to Jenner, fearing that all sorts of meat was being stuffed into intestine and being passed off as pork.
  13. Fancy toilets = cholera
  Good news for middle-class Victorians: flushing toilets are now available in the home. Bad news for most other Victorians, there isn’t a proper sewage system yet. Instead, toilet waste was flushed into rivers, which meant a massive cholera epidemic in urban areas.
  14. Romans used urine as mouthwash
  And not just any urine. Specifically, the urea of young boys from Portugal. It’s not entirely apparent why.