The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Throughout the 1930s, Lord Max Beaverbrook, owner of the London Daily Express, Sunday Express, and Evening Standard, used his best-selling newspapers to encourage British policy makers to dismiss or appease the Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler. He believed in ‘splendid...
One of my most precious possessions is a small Roman coin. It is a tiny sliver of silver, a denarius minted in 43 BCE in Asia Minor for the army of Brutus: yes, that Brutus, assassin of Julius Caesar, the addressee in “et tu, Brute?”. Along with his fellow assassin...
Directed by acclaimed playwright Samuel Rees, Snakehead is a palatable piece of gig-theatre, offering a refreshing re-examination of the Greek mythology tale, Medusa. Over the generations, the story of Medusa depicts the snake-haired woman as a monster, with a...
Summer Reads from Aspects of HistoryAlan Bardos Author of The Dardanelles ConspiracyQueen High by CJ Carey is the sequel to Widow Land and a counter factual/dystopian novel; in a similar vein to 1984, Fatherland and Brave New World. It is set in a 1950s Britain that...
When I began writing my latest novel, The Barbarian, the second book in the Marcus Flavius Victor series, the barbarian I had in mind was Flavius Stilicho, the Roman general who grasped the Empire’s reins in the wake of the death of the Emperor Theodosius in 395....
It is important to remember (and often overlooked in the West) that despite suffering a very high number of armoured losses on 12 July during the battle of Prokhorovka the Soviets achieved their central aim of halting the German II SS Panzer Korps’ drive on the town...
Our Future Was Forged by War In this new book, bestselling historian James Holland presents a readable, powerful narration of the key moments of the Second World War, vividly brought to life in full colour with illustrations from award-winning artist Keith Burns....
The Harold Pinter double bill of plays by the acclaimed playwright, praised for his social commentary and satire, opens with A Slight Ache. First performed in the nineteen fifties, the drama opens with a ubiquitous pause before an innocuous scene is played out between...
Reflections on Voltaire Voltaire was right three hundred years ago when he wrote, "The world would be a better place if those in power spent more time in their gardens." The world still isn’t taking his advice and wars and slaughter continue to dominate headlines, so...
The poet of Paradise Lost was better known in his own time as a pamphleteer. From 1641 to 1644, his writing optimistically imagined the world that might emerge from all the turmoil of civil war. It was an idealised, classical paradise of goodness, culture, education,...
