Hello everyone, it's me, Maddie. I am back. Well, not quite. I will be back on the pod very soon. But in the meantime, if you've missed your fix of Anthony and me together, you can now catch us live on stage at Conway Hall in London on the 7th of May. There we'll be discussing my brand new book,

Hoax, Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment, out that very same day. We'll be discovering

how fake news is nothing new, chatting about what it's like to spend time in the darker side

of the Georgian world, and meeting the three extraordinary, bizarre and

often frightening characters at the heart of the book. Cops of hoax will be available on the

night, which I'll be signing after the show and hopefully chatting to as many of you as possible.

So get your tickets now. The link is in the show notes. You can go to the Conway Hall website

or follow the link in my Instagram bio. I'm so excited about this book and I just can't wait to

share it with you all. Do come along. It is going to be the most fantastic evening. See you there.

We're standing in Bristol Museum and Art Gallery in the present day.

Around us, the sounds of visitors and schoolchildren tasked in some kind of activity echo off the marble of this vast building. The painting before us is small, unlike the large canvases either side of it, it requires

we get close to it, peer in, lean forward as though it wants to tell us its secrets. At its

centre is a young woman. She stands on the shoreline of a far-off island, the bay behind her ringed

with palm trees and fishermen's boats. Her gaze is direct, yet vague. There's something about

her flushed pink cheeks, dark brows and darker hair swept up in a white turban topped with peacock feathers,

that we can't quite place. Her dress is odd too, skirts bejouled and cut off just below the knee,

their swathes of gold enveloping her fleshy form beneath. She clasps a single flower to her bosom, while her feet, bare but for a

pair of strappy Romanesque sandals, appear to be taking her off and away just out of frame.

She's something of an exotic oddity here, among the dark portraits of Bristol's early 19th century industrialists and sentimental cottage scenes.

Certainly she's hard to place, to define.

On the surface, she might be a dignitary from across the British Empire, a local aristocrat of some colonial outpost to the

east, or maybe even a royal. What we're actually looking at, though, is one of the most infamous

...