The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
When writing my second Alexander Baxby mystery Naming the Dead, I tried to imagine what life was like for ordinary people in the early seventeenth century. A murder-solving physician such as Baxby would have witnessed much suffering and death. Average life expectancy...
Who was Edith Tudor-Hart? For a long time, and especially after the revelation of her crucial role in the creation of modern Britain's most notorious spy ring – the Cambridge Five – she existed more as a cipher than as a real person. I first encountered her name well...
If the question posed above were possible, states have already pushed assassination even further to the fore since the publication of Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination in the summer of 2025. However, if we look underneath the headlines, then the trends...
Lincolnshire has played a pivotal role in the history of England on more than one occasion with the Rising of 1536 being one such example which was itself a precursor to the larger Pilgrimage of Grace. Just over a century later, the county would again play an...
On 31st March 1875, Sergei Diaghilev was born into a wealthy Russian family. I salute the man who did so much to haul ballet into the 20th century. My historical novel, Dance of the Earth, spanning 1875 – 1921, is largely set in London. During this tumultuous era,...
The world might have found it hard to believe. After 22 years of marriage and having made her pregnant at least 12 times, Dickens, aged 46, built a wall in their bedroom to keep his wife, Catherine, out, forced her to visit his 18-year-old mistress to quell rumours,...
Our Smolensk excursion was quite an event for me – being my first trip out of Moscow… We were first going down there by car, but then plans were changed and a private train was provided – for us, two Foreign Office press officials and a bevy of N.K.V.D. The train was...
While it is often thought that British military engagement in northwestern Europe ended with Waterloo in 1815 and resumed, a century later, with the First World War in 1914 – with a few periods of invasion anxiety surfacing around the middle of the 19th century –the...
"It is with heavy heart that I tell you we have to cease fighting. Last night, I asked our adversary whether he was prepared, between soldiers, after the struggle and in honour, to seek a way to end hostilities." These were the words of France’s new prime minister,...
'Pug' Ismay was the personification of discretion and diplomacy. His book, The Memoirs of Lord Ismay, is testimony to this: no revelations are included, no confidences betrayed, no secrets exposed. There is hardly an unkind word about any of the people he met or...
