The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
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...
Some historians have labelled it a ‘genocide’, whereas other have suggested that what King William I did in the north of England, in the winter of 1069/70, was not out of character with the standards of the time. But, whilst we should always try to avoid projecting...
When on 19 August 14 CE, the Emperor Augustus died, by his side was his wife, Livia Drusilla. Livia was a paragon of Roman womanly virtues, who put hardly a foot wrong in fifty years of marriage to the most scrutinised man of his time, and yet, from at least the 2nd...
De Gaulle wrote of Churchill, and might well have written of himself, that he was an ‘artist of history.’ Both men were artists in how they wrote their history, but also lived their lives as thought they were constructing a work of art. They understood that every act...
The historical context of Delhi – City of Spies is crucial to my novel because it is the true story of an unsolved murder that took place in New Delhi in 1954 at the height of the Cold War. Although my book is based on a family archive and is, therefore, subjective...
My short story City of the Damned traces the years of Hugh O’Neill's life from his defeat at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601 to his exile in Rome surrounded by spies, plots, and the threat of poison. This is the man who came closest to ending English rule in Ireland and...
Almost as feted a family as the Tudors, the name conjures images of decadent royal Russia, of grizzled Siberian sorcerers and beautiful princesses (or grand duchesses), bejewelled palaces and icy, splendid St Petersburg. Although their reign spanned some several...
