Napoleon’s Brush With ‘Black Spartacus’ The Haitian revolution was one of the defining episodes in modern global history. It began in 1791 with a mass uprising of the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue, France’s richest and most profitable colony. Drawing upon local...
Bethany Hall
FDR & Stalin: The Strategists
FDR & Stalin: The Strategists Stalin as the Worst Strategist Why I argue Stalin is both the Worst and Best war leader is because you need to start with the worst before you get to the best. Stalin, in opting to ally with Hitler in 1939 and sign the Nazi-Soviet...
How Far is Modern Russia a Prisoner of its Past?
Vladimir Putin clearly fancies himself something of a historian – even if, as a professional historian, I feel much of his ‘work’ would struggle to get a passing grade, laden as it is with factual inaccuracies and the careful cherry picking of evidence to fit his...
The Lopez Case
The case of Dr Roderigo Lopez, the only physician to English royalty ever to be executed for high treason, is not particularly well known, though Dominic Green’s The Double Life of Dr Lopez has done much to fill this gap in our knowledge. The case, however, provides a...
Wally Hammond
Wally Hammond In early April 1945, even while Hitler remained alive, directing phantom armies from his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden in Berlin, the English cricket authorities decided that it might be possible to stage a number of Test-level matches with...
Mayne the SAS & the VC That Never Was
Mayne the SAS & the VC Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne and a core of stalwarts were unwilling to let the history of this proud unit die with its dissolution. Instead, they took the Chronik of Schneeren town, unscrewed the brass bolts that held its spine together, removed the...
Chasing Shadows
Chasing Shadows In the summer of 2003, I was one of around 1,200 American, British, and Australian intelligence personnel sent to Baghdad to form the Iraq Survey Group (ISG). The task of this unprecedented field intelligence operation was simple: locate the Weapons of...
Pride’s Purge
Pride's Purge Early in the morning of 6 December 1648, soldiers began to gather around Whitehall. Some were on foot, some on horse. A pale light was beginning to show in the sky. It was cold, and the atmosphere was edgy. At the heart of the mass of buildings that...
The Other Norman Conquest
In England, the phrase ‘Norman Conquest’ immediately conjures up images of arrows in the eye, the Bayeux tapestry and an abrupt transition from Anglo-Saxon rule to Norman feudalism. But the conquest of England was just one facet of the extraordinary expansion of...
I’m done with po-faced politicians
By 10pm on the night of 9th June 1983 BBC Television centre was humming. In Studio Two, amid a beige version of the set from Alien, David Dimbleby and Robin Day were about to start the election results show, though everybody already knew Thatcher was going to walk it....