The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
During World War Two, 39 women were specially selected to work in a secretive, clandestine and mainly male domain: the Special Operations Executive, French Section (SOE F). Ranging from housewives and mothers to shop assistants and countesses, these women were put...
The New Model Army takes on board a great deal of new research – by Phil Baker, Rachel Foxley and John Rees among others -- on the Leveller movement, with whom the New Model was in close contact throughout its fifteen-year history. When in the 1650s the soldiers...
I would like to start by asking a question. What triggered your journey with Titanic? Was it the the 1956 black and white film A Night To Remember or the discovery of the Titanic in 1985 Was it the James Cameron film Titanic in 1997 maybe a Titanic exhibition or maybe...
London: Origins of a Modern City If there ever was a revolution in 17th century Britain, it did not occur on the battlefields of the 1640s between the forces of the Royalists and the Parliamentarians. It was a slower, more evolutionary transformation that spanned a...
"Glory to Ukraine!" In 1991, 2004 and 2014, the Maidan in Kyiv was the stage for three major events that etched Ukraine into the European consciousness. These were the fall of the Soviet Union, the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan respectively, the last of which...
As a 6-year-old at the time, my memory of the Falklands War is vague and seen through the prism of national newspaper headlines and the 6 o’clock news. With my father in the army, I was all for The Sun’s portrayal of the British Army as supermen, and it seemed a fait...
The path toward my novel, The Plague Letters, started with letters written by the Rev. Symon Patrick of St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden to his friend, Mrs Elizabeth Gauden. The year was 1665 and a massive plague epidemic had broken out in London. After initially...
Roman Britain's Lost Ninth Legion The fate of the 5,500 men of legio IX Hispana is one of the greatest historical mysteries of all time. Uniquely among the Roman legions, of which there were over time more than 60 (and at any one time in the Empire a maximum of 33),...
In the popular mind, World War Two endures as the ‘Good War’: a heroic struggle against evil with a happy ending. But there have always been nagging questions, not least whether any conceivable post-war world was worth the sacrifice of 50 or 60 million dead. Why did a...
Why is it so easy to hate and difficult to love? When societies fracture into warring tribes, we demonise those who oppose us. We tear down our statues, forgetting that what begins with the destruction of statues, often leads to the killing of people. The world is in...
