The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Shadow of A Queen As I am by no means the first to observe, history, like hindsight, tends to be 20/20 vision. We know how things turned out in the end and we often assume that this was the way they were meant to be - whereas of course the men and women actually...
Emma Sergeant’s ‘La Selva Oscura’ - Review Emma Sergeant’s newest exhibition, titled ‘La Selva Oscura’ at the Lavery Studio in South Kensington, explores the themes of Dante’s Inferno, as well as being inspired by her home in Poland. Sergeant is one of our most...
From Fact into Fiction: The Origins of The Devils of Cardona As every historian knows, the past is another country, and documents are the indispensable tools that we use to find our way into it. Wander too far from the paper trail, and history can easily drift into...
Anywhere But The Western Front More than 100 years after the guns finally fell silent, our memory of the outbreak of the World War One is still firmly centered on what happened in Belgium and France. This is perhaps not surprising, as, in many ways, it was here that...
Finding Carthage Among The Romans The destruction of Carthage by the armies of the Roman Republic in 146BC was a seminal event in the rise of Rome to power across the Mediterranean. In popular memory, Carthage has, ever since, been remembered as that ‘enemy’ of Rome....
The Captive Years of Mary, Queen of Scots If my latest book Exile were a novel, nobody could predict its ending. With the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, however, the final chapter is well known: the ailing queen, dressed in russet, with a small dog hidden beneath her...
‘Specimens of Snobbery’: Cricket and the Hypocrisy of the Victorian Imagination ‘The national game of cricket,’ wrote Lord William Lennox in 1840, ‘has a peculiar claim to the people generally; and is one of those games open alike to all. It is free from selfishness,...
The History behind The Bratinsky Affair "It is not the wimpled version of history that is interesting but its brutality." - Hilary Mantel The story of Countess Irina Bratinsky, née O’Rourke de Breffny, has its roots in the religious wars of 17th-century Ireland and...
Historical Heroes: Chiune Sugihara Chiune Sugihara is the little-known Japanese World War 2 hero who saved thousands of refugees with his pen. Through his quiet defiance, he issued what became known as ‘Visas for Life’, helping an estimated 6,000 Jewish refugees...
The Five Armies That Made Europe Regrettably, war is inevitable. Many of us who have had the privilege of being born in Western democracies after 1945 have been spared having to confront war directly. This has created a false optimism that future generations may not...
