The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Women's Football and the First World War December 5 2021 marks the 100-year anniversary of women’s football being effectively banned by the FA and it’s progress set back by decades. The ban was finally formally lifted 50 years later in 1971. Although there had been a...
The Memory of Wounds It has been said that ignorance of history ensures its repetition. This view surely extends the power of knowledge beyond its limits. If history teaches us anything, it’s that knowledge is in thrall to denial, vengeance, hate, love and there...
Books of 2021 from Aspects of HistoryAlan Bardos Author of The Dardanelles ConspiracyLaw of Blood is the first in R.N. Morris’s new Empire of Shadows series, featuring magistrate Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky. In Law of Blood, Virginsky investigates the murder of a...
Mining for History Researching British history can be both a pleasure and a trial. You might well start with the relevant secondary works, but in my experience that only serves to whet the appetite. It’s when you trawl through the minutiae of contemporary written...
Starting to write a new novel is both an overwhelming and, contrarily, exciting experience for me as I never know which path the book will take me. In my latest novel, The Orphan’s Secret, Lily Armstrong, enlists in the Women’s Timber Corps – something of which I had...
Writing Arctic Star There are hundreds of children’s books about war. From Boudica’s Britain to Bagram Airbase, all theatres are included. But the majority of children’s war fiction covers the First and Second World Wars and it is deployed by teachers in schools to...
With the declaration of war against France in 1756, British military planners turned covetous eyes to a fortress on Cape Breton Island, next to Nova Scotia in the North Atlantic. The fortress at Louisbourg, sometimes called the “Gibraltar of the North,” cast a long...
While researching my latest book Churchill Master and Commander, one of the more bizarre things I discovered was Churchill’s undying enthusiasm for the use of mustard gas. Britain at the start of the Second World War had 500 tons of the stuff, by the end Churchill had...
The British Way of War is about the interconnected lives of a man and an idea, lives that reached a climax in the catastrophe of the First World War Western Front. Great ideas do not emerge in a vacuum, they are shaped by individuals, and reflect the time in which...
Football and the Nazis Think of the Nazis and sport and it’s usually the 1936 Berlin Olympics which comes to mind, with the Games turned into a sophisticated in propaganda exercise, which the International Olympic Committee and too many participant countries happily...
