The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
I sometimes wonder why wonderful factual stories are dramatized and the historical information changed to create a better story. I understand it is dramatic licence and perhaps it makes for a more exciting story particularly for a movie or TV series like The Crown or...
Colonialism: a Moral Reckoning contains a lot of history. If it does nothing else, I hope it will inform Britons, young and old, of the whole truth about our three-hundred-year career of imperial endeavour all over the world. For it tells not only of the tragic,...
The Slipperiness of History I was really interested to read recently that the coded letters of Mary Queen of Scots have been deciphered by modern computer scientists and decoders. Undoubtedly this will give us hitherto unknown insights into what we know about her and...
I keep overhearing people debating between themselves the comparison of Robert Oppenheimer and Alan Turing, his British near contemporary - Turing was six years younger - who was the originator of modern computing. I feel as if this is also a debate that I ought to...
Congratulations to Julian Jackson, the author of France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Petain, on winning the 2023 Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize. Our editor and part of our board attended an elegant and enjoyable event at the Travellers Club in Pall Mall. The champagne...
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...
