Emma Lansdown, Author at Aspects of History

How England Began

How Britain broke away from the Roman world is as essential to understanding the rise of the English language and a national identity as Germanic migration, subsequent conflict with native Britons and conversion to Christianity.

Nicholas Higham

The western Roman Empire collapsed so long ago that we might well ask ‘why should that matter to us now?’. Yet, in multiple ways, our lives are conditioned, still, by those events. Take language, for example. Mostly, the western Empire spoke Latin. Despite substantial...

Monarchs Anonymous at The Other Palace Theatre

A review of the historical comedy show which forces famous historical figures into a group therapy session.

Richard Foreman

Monarchs Anonymous is a fun, frenetic show that should appeal to a variety of ages. The premise is a therapy session involving multiple monarchs. The figures taking part are Marie Antionette, Mansa Musa, Charles II, Henry VIII and Princess Sophia Duleep Singh....

Prisoners of the Rising Sun: Life in Wartime Shanghai

Life as a foreign national or a prisoner of war inside the Japanese internment camps required resilience and courage, and sits at the core of the author’s latest novel.

Deborah Swift

The International Settlement of Shanghai was a city within a city, an island of Western lifestyle dominated by the British and American concessions, which were ruled by an Anglo-American council. South of the settlement was the French Concession, where many wealthy...

Sex, Psychoanalysis, and the Big Freeze of 1963

1963 acts as a pivot in the author’s new novel, one which brings into focus the strain between the previous decade’s conservatism and the approach of both female freedom and societal change, all against the backdrop of wintry weather.

Lucy Ashe

Philip Larkin in his poem Annus Mirabilis highlighted the year 1963 as a time of momentous transition. The end of the Lady Chatterley ban, the rise of The Beatles, the beginnings of the sexual revolution, all seductive ingredients for me, an author writing a novel...

The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire

A persuasive shift of focus onto the victims, one that reveals the human cost of Kim Philby’s leaking of operations behind the Iron Curtain, distinguishes a new examination of the Cambridge Five.

Antonia Senior

Consider a boy. His name is Vasilli Ivanovich Bardeish. He has a weak chin, and jug ears which stick out sideways from his head. In May 1951, he is 22 years old. Vasilli has had the great misfortune to be born in Ukraine in 1929. To two vicious totalitarian dictators...

Our Man in Hawaii

A Japanese spy in Hawaii: how his meticulous gathering of intelligence almost gave away the plans to attack Pearl Harbour.

Alan Bardos

The Japanese Imperial Navy conducted extensive intelligence gathering in Hawaii as part of its preparations for the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, using a spy attached to their consulate named Takeo Yoshikawa. Yoshikawa meticulously gathered vital intelligence on the...

The Road Back to Boston

On April 19 1775, colonial troops battled redcoats at Concord's North Bridge, which resulted in nearly three-hundred British casualties and paved the way for American independence.

Thor Hogan

I have read Esther Forbes’ Newbery Medal-winning Johnny Tremain perhaps thirty times. It is the reason I fell in love with historical fiction as a child. But the book, for all its brilliance, left me wanting to know more. The novel is set primarily in the period...

Dealbreakers: Advice on how to turn your submission into a publishing contract.

Publishing advice for first-time novelists from a professional editor

Charlotte Rose

The Aspects team regularly receives enquiries about publishing and submitting manuscripts. I have provided some helpful tips and advice below, which should aid first-time novelists in navigating the process and increase their chances of securing a deal and getting...

A Rocket in the Marshes

In 1944, the Polish resistance managed to recover parts of Hitler’s secret V-2 rockets and passed vital intelligence to Britain, the operation becoming one of the most remarkable, yet overlooked, intelligence successes of the war.

Guy Walters

In a lonely corner of eastern Poland, not far from the River Bug, there is a stretch of countryside that looks entirely unremarkable. The villages are small and sleepy, the roads narrow and uneven, the fields flat and windswept. When I visited last November, a cold...