The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Historical Heroes: Charles Dickens From pasting labels onto pots at the blacking factory, from taking supper with his family in the Marshalsea Prison, to the top of the Victorian literary tree, Charles Dickens’s story is a remarkable one. The blacking factory by...
The Reel War: Military History & Film War Films provide drama, tension and horror in the right quantities to keep audiences in their seats. Having been in both the military and the film industry I’ve seen first-hand the pressure on a film’s historical accuracy of...
How To Sell Historical Fiction: The Past Is The Future There is plenty of attention given to the question of promoting and selling new books, but one of the things that has pleasantly surprised me since the launch of Aspects of History is just how well backlist...
In 1066 King Harold Godwinson of England met Duke William of Normandy on the battlefield near Hastings in what proved to be a pivotal moment in English history. What is less well known is that this was not the first time that the two men had shared a battlefield....
Ockham’s Razor’s Tess Ockham’s Razor is unbounded in its imagination as it tells the story of Tess of the D’Ubervilles through a circus-adaptation, sweeping you away with its unparalleled brilliance. Directed by Alex Harvey and Charlotte Mooney, an ensemble of seven...
From Taranto to Pearl Harbor I’ve always been captivated by the daring and skill of the Fleet Air Arm's attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto in 1940 and the much larger airstrike on Pearl Harbour, carried out a year later by the Japanese Navy. They were pioneering...
In honour of Aspects of History launching its new podcast, Spymasters, I was asked to recommend five spy novels. I wouldn't say these are my definitive five favourite spy novels, as I could wake up tomorrow and recommend five others, but I hope that the choices give...
The Mysterious Death of Joseph Stalin Stalin was feeling weak on account of his unusually high blood pressure. He was also complaining of dizziness. Yet his temper was as fiery as ever on the evening of 28 February 1953. He had invited a few of his closest comrades to...
In the Legion XXII books (Capsarius and Bellatrix) our intrepid Romans come up against the warrior queen of Kush, but who was she, who were her people, and why did this conflict occur? Well, without wanting to drop a plethora of spoilers for the books, here’s a...
Legion at the British Museum When one imagines the Roman Empire, as so many do as we recently learnt, the sheer scale implies some kind of chaotic organisation. With the boundaries stretching from Scotland to Libya, and from Portugal to the Caspian Sea, the...
