The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Three years ago, while standing at the urinal in The Gallery pub in Pimlico, it suddenly struck me that if I didn’t see a nightingale or a turtledove soon, I probably never would. It isn’t the sort of place I usually have revelations but three pints in, I was hung up...
What kind of historical heretic would even ask that question? Of course, Hadrian’s Wall is a masterpiece, an extension of Imperial power that has seized the imagination over almost two millennia, and is still recognised today as one of the wonders of the world. A...
The assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP on June 22nd 1922 was a profoundly shocking event in British and Irish history. There had not been an assassination in Britain of a sitting MP since the prime minister Spencer Perceval who was killed in 1812....
It seems so long ago; but once it was ‘all of our yesterdays’. My Burning Steel book is based on an oral history project interviewing the veterans of the 2nd Fife and Forfar Yeomanry (2nd F&FY) whilst working as the oral historian for the Imperial War Museum Sound...
Kissinger on Ukraine In his doctoral thesis, published in 1957 as A World Restored. Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822, Henry Kissinger put up a strong defence of the settlement reached at the Congress of Vienna. He argued that as there could...
The Journey Down In May 1982, my commanding officer unexpectedly asked me if I would like to go on an all expenses paid luxury cruise to the Falkland Islands, attached to the HQ element of 5th Infantry Brigade, aboard the grandest liner afloat: Queen Elizabeth II. The...
Bologna, Italy. November 1920. Ennio Gnudi was a humble railway worker. He was also a revolutionary communist. In the recent local elections, he had been elected to the council. Now, he had risen to be Mayor of the city. The Socialist Party’s radical left was about to...
Tony Blair and the Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, didn’t have a part a year ago when I was first writing about The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar. Now that the paperback is coming out, it seems a bit easier to write about the rather...
By the third year of the First World War, France was growing increasingly war weary. Over a million men had been killed, wounded or captured, with little to show for it. Russia had had a revolution and unrest was spreading through the French Army, fanned by turmoil at...
I was looking for a drowned girl. My old friend, Professor Swaine Taylor had provided the grisly forensic detail in his Medical Jurisprudence: ‘the eyelids livid, and the pupils dilated; the mouth closed or half-open, the tongue swollen and congested, frequently...
