The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
I was very interested to see Archduke, as I have spent years researching and writing about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The Royal Court warned me that the play was not entirely historically accurate. So it would be bad form to list all the historical...
55BC, as Sellar and Yeatman knew, is “the first date in English history”. Caesar led his legions across the sea and gave the Britons a thrashing. This, of course, was “a Good Thing, since the Britons were only natives at that time.” Caesar could hardly have put it any...
I’m frequently asked how much of my novel Sawadika American Girl is drawn from real life. A work of historical fiction, it is the story of a 17-year-old American woman coming-of-age in 1968 Thailand when the country served as a major US military outpost for America’s...
Summer Reads from Aspects of HistoryZeb Baker-Smith Editor at Aspects of HistoryPaul Knox’s Lost London offers a captivating itinerary of 25 buildings which are no longer, but whose lifespan shaped the capital’s architectural story, revealing how the perennial cycle...
I have been fascinated by the multi-cultural history of Sicily since I read Kingdom in the Sun by John Julius Norwich. When I first arrived in Sicily fifteen years ago, I was quite literally dazzled by a confusing and exotic mix of architectural styles, languages, and...
On 2nd March this year, an Iranian Shahed drone struck an aircraft hangar at RAF Akrotiri causing minor damage. The Iranian regime identified Akrotiri besides its sister RAF station Dhekelia and a host of other scattered facilities across the island, which are on...
The passing of time has a strange way in these parts. As the carnyces sound around site, WW2 jeeps swing by, Celts mingle with civil war militia, Neolithic outfits juxtaposed with band members of the much-loved ABBA tribute, you’d be forgiven for a certain amount of...
Roger Moorhouse is a prolific historian specialising in the Nazis and World War Two and his recently published Wolfpack: Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War is a corrective to the common perception that U-Boats were terrifying and effective silent killers from the deep. The...
A night in a bed, if not a cure to stem the swells of insomnia, helped. Tuesday had been sapping and the idea of escaping the site, shade at a premium under the midsummer sun, attractive when a schoolmate invited me to stay in the neighbouring village. My father and...
Chalke goers are a stoic breed and the 40 degree heat (and humidity) did not put a dampener on the day. Top of the billing was America 250: The Continuing Revolution: What Next for American Democracy with luminaries including Anne Applebaum (Gulag, Iron Curtain) and...
