The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
How Kublai Khan made China the first Maritime Superpower Two dominant impressions came to mind when I began to write a book on Kublai Khan. One was the opium-inspired poem Kubla by Samuel Taylor Coleridge describing the Mongol emperors summer capital of Xanadu. The...
Mary, Queen of Scots has traditionally been perceived as a queen who let her emotions overcome her reason, as someone who let her heart rule her head. It’s a dismissive attitude that is often used to compare her, unfavourably, to Queen Elizabeth I, who is seen instead...
Ghosts of the English Civil War Open the pages of almost any anthology of English ghost stories and, sooner rather than later, you will encounter the figure of a grim-faced Roundhead, a forlorn Cavalier or a pretty maid ravished by some rambling soldier, or...
The tunnel under the English Channel - the seaway the French call La Manche - was ready for its first trains when a Frenchman looked set to derail the whole enterprise. Florent Longuepee, a right-wing Paris city councillor, wrote to the British government requesting...
Not every distinguished historian announces his arrival by the roar of a V8 engine, but Robin Prior is no ordinary historian and - for me at least - this was to be no ordinary lunch. I was planning a new book, the final volume in my Finest Hour trilogy about Britain...
Cicero, the greatest public speaker of the Roman Republic, started life with a handicap. The name “Cicero” was obscure. While Rome was a republic, with all of its magistrates selected in annual elections, a hereditary nobility dominated politics. To be a Scipio, a...
My recent book Who Will Rescue Us? represents over ten years of historical research on a group of primarily Jewish children who fled Nazi Germany and Austria. The goals of my study were multiple: I wanted to grasp- to the extent possible- what it felt like to be a...
By the summer of 1097 the armies of the First Crusade had captured the Seljuk Turk capital of Nicaea and were moving on towards Jerusalem. In their way stood the fortress city of Antioch. They could not simply march around the city as this would leave a secure,...
Epic tales: the surprising search for identity and origins in Virgil and Dante At times of trouble and transition, communities will often find a story that brings them together. From the Iliad to the Shahnahmeh, from ʿAntar to Beowulf, epic tales take familiar ideas...
In WW2 Europe, escape routes for Jewish refugees were vanishing one by one. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Kaunas in Lithuania became a haven for Jewish families fleeing the brutality of the Nazis. But that safety was short-lived. As the numbers needing to flee...
