What if walls could talk? For historian Madeleine Pelling, they can - if you know where to look. A brilliant new cultural history of the long eighteenth century, Writing on the Wall is told through the marks its citizens left behind, bringing into focus lost voices from the highest to the lowest in society. From the centre of London to the islands of the Caribbean, Pelling goes in search of graffiti, evidence of how ordinary people experienced the world-changing events that defined their lives - from political prisoners to travelling vicars, homesick sailors, Romantic poets and the artisans of the industrial revolution. Here are lives, loves, triumphs and failures, scratched into the walls of prisons and latrines, chalked up on doors and etched into churches. The names of their creators may be lost to history, but together they tell the real story of Britain's most rebellious and transformative century.

Dr Madeleine Pelling is a historian, writer and broadcaster. She holds a PhD from the University of York, and her first book, Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain, will be published by Profile Books in March 2024. Madeleine is also co-host of History Hit's After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal podcast, and is a regular contributor to television made by broadcasters including Channel 4 and Warner Bros. Her words appear in The Guardian, The Independent, BBC History Magazine and History Today, as well as across a range of international scholarly journals.