The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Ho Chi Minh & the Vietnam War I never imagined for one minute that my previous works on Third Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment during World War II would lead to something quite like Sign Here For Sacrifice. However, the synergy between the battalion’s...
The Springfield Witch-Hunt Like most books, The Ruin of All Witches took years to research and write, but all along I’d thought of it as a real-life fairy tale. At the time I began working on it, I was reading Philip Pullman’s masterly retelling of Grimms’ tales to my...
When planning Clara & Olivia, I knew I wanted the setting of the novel to be a 1933 production of Coppélia performed by the Vic-Wells Ballet at Sadler’s Wells theatre. However, by the time I had finished writing the novel, many more ballets had found their way...
Charles Dickens and Charity: The most perplexing female I have ever encountered… In the research for my novels featuring Dickens as an amateur detective, I frequently turn to the Pilgrim Edition of the letters. The footnotes provide all kinds of fascinating detail for...
It is hard today to come to terms with the speed of communication that existed some 150 years ago. In an age where instant video conferencing is available to all it can bring some of my readers up short when I tell them that even 50 or 60 years ago to speak to...
In 1066 Harold Godwinsson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, was killed at the battle of Hastings. Yet England was not conquered in a single day. The victor, Duke William of Normandy, had to fight tooth and nail for several years to hold onto his conquest. To...
The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Do languages constitute nations, or do nation-states constitute languages? That is one of the recurring questions in modern history, and it is not simply an intellectual brain-teaser. Languages, and the national passions they can stir,...
The concept of history as a mirror is a familiar one, but it can be a dangerous adage to follow. For novelists dealing with the Third Reich, a period which can feel as soaked in fake news as our own, it is particularly troublesome. Most of us are aware of Goebbels and...
Cities come and go, some destroyed by humanity, others by nature, others simply abandoned. Several decades ago, I happened upon an example of the last kind, in India. The redstone city was deserted, its wide empty paved streets extending into the distance towards the...
From the Questions here Which play, written by Euripides, is set in Thebes during the rule of Pentheus? The Bacchae Alexander of Macedon is known as The Great, but what number Alexander was he? Alexander III After Nero’s botched suicide attempt, Rome entered the year...
