The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The Dublin Railway Murder On the morning of Friday 14 November 1856 the chief cashier of the Broadstone railway terminus, George Little, failed to report for work. It was out of character for such a conscientious employee to disappear without warning, and his worried...
Bosnia and Herzegovina was a hotly disputed territory in 1914. It had been annexed by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1910 from the crumbling Ottoman Empire, but was also claimed by neighbouring Serbia and had a growing nationalist movement that wanted it to be part...
In the autumn of 1266 Henry III was bogged down at Kenilworth castle in Warwickshire, besieging the Montfortian garrison. While focused on crushing the revolt in England, the king also had other pressing business to attend to. While the siege was in progress, he...
The two main characters of my novel The Bloodless Boy were real people. Both employed by the Royal Society of London, Robert Hooke was its Curator of Experiments, and Harry Hunt, who had been Hooke’s apprentice, was an ‘observator’. My story has them investigate the...
A scandal of such allure that the House of Lords, the judicial system, the British press and London society ignored a turning point in the American War of Independence, possibly the last moment peace might have broken out: this was the trial for bigamy of Elizabeth...
Writing history in a post-feminist era, when readers are especially alert to issues of social and racial justice, requires a sensitive approach to modern opinions. Authors today have to accept that many influential academics are highly critical of government authority...
Napoleon's Hat Joseph J Sullivan’s 1888 music hall song poses a question that has been asked by auction houses around the work since 1815, albeit that the enquiry invariably refers to one specific model of ‘tile’: that worn by Napoléon from 1800, shortly after he...
In 1940 Olivia Jordan, then Matthews, drove an ambulance under fire in France, escaped to Britain as the Germans closed in and became Charles de Gaulle’s driver-translator in London. Subsequently she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, though talking of her war work last...
In 1308, the exiled Florentine poet Dante Alighieri described how, midway through his life, he found himself lost amidst a dark wood, with no sign of a path. He had no idea how he had arrived where he was. His mind was fogged; it was as if he had woken from a deep...
‘Please just let me see my Johanna again’ – those were the whispered last words of the once towering figure of Otto von Bismarck, breathed out as he lay on his death bed on 30 July 1898. He had spent a lifetime building up a reputation as a tenacious politician with a...
