The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
After writing a novel about the French Revolution, my appetite for research had been whetted. Apart from family anecdotes – my father was at Dunkirk and fought in the desert and Italy - I knew shamingly little about the Second World War and decided to do something...
A great deal of garbage has been written regarding 1950s American murderer and ‘body snatcher’/graverobber Ed Gein. Gein (born in 1906) grew up in Plainfield in Wisconsin under the thumb of an - allegedly - religious zealot of a mother; she was his entire world and...
The Business of Conquest In 1756, the East India Company decided to strengthen its position in Kolkata by investing heavily in new fortifications. The Indian city had grown from only a few thousand people to around 400,000 in only fifty years – larger than any town in...
Much as the vast majority of medieval royal marriages, Margaret of Anjou's marriage was one of pure political necessity over which she had no influence. She would in theory live her life at the mercy of the policies of her husband, at the often cruel demands of war...
John Reith was a model of late-Victorian rectitude: devout, driven, serious to the point of severity. He was also, in many ways, an appalling man, self-absorbed, obsessed with titles and money, often petty and spiteful, even childish. He was deeply sentimental and a...
Set in East London in 1936, as Oswald Mosley’s fascists prepare to march, Cable Street brings the streets of the East End vividly to life, capturing a community under strain as simmering social and political tensions reach boiling point. The story narrows its focus to...
On the afternoon of 30 June 2007, outside Terminal One at Glasgow Airport, a baggage handler was on a fly cigarette break when a Jeep Cherokee sped towards the main entrance and smashed into the security bollards. It looked like some sort of crazy ram-raid. After the...
Fitzpatrick, or “Fitz” as he was known, was commissioned into South Staffordshire Regt in 1914, serving with the 3rd Battalion during World War One. Transferred to the Indian Army’s 14th Punjab Regiment after the war, subsequent to its return from Palestine in 1923,...
The Second World War saw a desperate conflict between Allied and Axis scientists, who were locked in a deadly arms race to develop new technology - in what Winston Churchill called the Wizard War. To gain the upper hand in this secret war, the Royal Navy formed a...
Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts is not a play that tries to win you over gently, and the production at the Questors Theatre did little to soften its impact. Set firmly within the Alving household and unfolding without an interval, the evening pressed forward with an...
