The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Racism & Murder in WW2 Hull I grew up in Cottingham – one of the claimants for largest village in England, but in effect, a suburb of the city of Hull – in the 1960s, in reality just a few years after the Second World War had ended, although as a child it seemed...
Inside A Renaissance Painter’s Studio In 1510, the year in which my new novel The Colour Storm is set, nearly every great painter of the age was actively at work. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bellini, Titian, Raphael, Dürer, Hieronymous Bosch and, the principal of my...
‘… the sufferings of which were dreadful … when I awoke with that horror upon me …’ Charles Dickens had a cold. Man flu? One might wonder when reading the dramatic description of his anguish. But he was a novelist given to melodrama at times, and, considering the...
Summer Reads from Aspects of HistoryTimothy Ashby Author of Elizabethan Secret Agent: The Untold Story of William Ashby (1536-1593)At the top of my favourites list of recent historical books is Leanda de Lisle´s The White King. Although non-fiction, the book reads...
CVHF Highlights So Far Monday 20th June Power & Privilege: A Recent History Simon Kuper (author of Chums) & Richard Beard (Sad Little Men) discussed the corrosive impact of public schools and Oxford University on recent British political life. Their discussion...
In the 1570s Thomas Whythorne, a musician and composer, wrote an account of his life. It’s an extraordinary document, not least since the term and concept of ‘autobiography’ didn’t yet exist. Whythorne charts his changing mental states through the different phases and...
On the morning of the 19th November 1978 I entered my classroom at the Alliance Française in Paris, where I was attending a course in advanced French. A few minutes later our teacher, M. Beaulieu, strode in. Instead of his usual jovial ‘Bonjour, bonjour tout le monde’...
In one of Lin Manuel Miranda’s catchiest tunes in the musical Hamilton, Hamilton’s doppelganger Aaron Burr sings longingly about being in “the room where it happens,” on the inside, shaping momentous actions. Anyone who has spent time around political types will...
My historical novel Dark Earth opens in 500AD on a mud island in the Thames. Two Saxon sisters, Isla and Blue, have been exiled to the mud island with their father the Great Smith. The local overlord has imprisoned the smith to ensure that the ‘firetongued’ swords...
By April 1917 the Allies and the Central Powers had been locked in the stalemate of trench warfare for nearly three years. Numerous offensives had failed to break through at a terrible cost in men. New tactical and technological innovations were developed with some...
