An Intimate History of the Home My everyday routine as Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces takes me into some of England's most impressive and historic buildings, but my own home is just an ordinary modern flat. Much to my surprise, though, the research I've done over the last few years has made me see that even a boring conventional flat has rather a fascinating story behind each of its rooms. In my latest book, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History Of The Home I've looked at the history of the four main rooms of a house: bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen. I've explored what people actually did in bed, in the bath, at the table, and at the stove. This has taken me from sauce-stirring to breast-feeding, teeth-cleaning to masturbation, getting dressed to getting married. I've included lots of tiny, quirky and seemingly trivial details, but through them I think we can chart great, overarching, revolutionary changes in society. A person's home makes an excellent starting point for assessing their time and place. 'I've a great respect for things!' says a character in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881). 'One's house, one's furniture, one's garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps - these things are all expressive'. That's why, of course, we invest so much money in our homes: they help define who we really are. Looking into the bedrooms of the past, I was intrigued to discover that they were rather crowded,