The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
A Persian Journey ‘This Persian journey was the best in all my life’. I came across this note in a diary my grandmother Dorothy (‘Dottie’) Wellesley had kept during a trip to Persia in 1927. She added these words nearly twenty-five years later when she was writing her...
Secrets & The Public Interest In October 2005, while the late MI6 and MI5 officer Walter Bell’s personal papers were gathering dust , undiscovered in the basement of his London home, the historian Peter Hennessy, in the prestigious annual Cambridge Hinsley...
A few words about the title of the book: Those Must Be The Guards. In March 1919 the Guards marched through London as part of the great victory parade. The Times reported rather grandly on the event: ‘A joyous welcome to the Guards ….. fighting through to the end and...
Holmes Is Where the Heart Is Crime comes to south-east London again, but this time in the form of an innovative adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story, The Valley of Fear, at The Southwark Playhouse. The drama covers two stories - the mystery of the murder of John...
NATO’s Greatest Achievement Readers may rightly wonder why NATO, so pre-eminent as Europe’s security foundation, is so timid in its response to Russia’s war on Ukraine. To fully grasp this, we need to look back to NATO’s perhaps greatest achievement, namely its...
Land of the Blind There is a joke in the army that after a conflict we used to have “lessons learned” sessions to ensure we would avoid similar mistakes in the next conflict, but we had to rename “lessons learned” to “lessons identified” as we frequently identified...
Orwell & The Past He who controls the past controls the future. Past time in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a shadowy affair, a matter of casual inferences and stray fragments of detail. There may at one point be talk of the nuclear warhead that fell on Colchester during...
In the summer of 1870, France declared war on Prussia. Within weeks, it faced invasion by a Prussia-led German coalition that included both the North German Confederation that Prussia dominated and the southern German states of Bavarian, Baden, and Württemberg. The...
Mycenae: Behind the Myths Most ancient Greek myths take place during a heroic age, when men fought with monsters and gods walked among us. The roots of these myths are in an often-overlooked period of Greek prehistory: the Bronze Age. The Greek poet Hesiod identifies...
It is generally accepted that the European Renaissance began in Italy. However, as this developed south of the Alps a historical transformation of similar magnitude began taking place in northern Europe. This ‘Other Renaissance’ was initially centred on the city of...
