The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The First Kingdom – How the Sutton Hoo dig rescued the 'Dark Ages' Before the 1920s, archaeologists excavating the deep past had barely tapped into the potential for their trowels and picks to illuminate the 'Dark Ages' – that obscure period in British history between...
The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in November 1922 made headlines around the world. It was a good news story, after the devastating years of the Great War followed by the flu pandemic. Some canny manufacturers were so sure it was going to start a trend that they...
What do you do if you’re an uneducated 20-year-old Victorian woman, married to an unimpressive man, with two children but still living with your Mum, the threat of the workhouse ever looming? This was the life of Emily Soldene when she read a glowing review of the...
The Imperial War Museum has just opened an exhibition by Wim Wenders, Photographing Ground Zero, to commemorate the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. For such a huge event, 20 years ago, the free-to-enter display of his work is measured, thought-provoking, and highly...
In the course of reading for review (and pleasure) Saul David’s latest and most excellent book, SBS: Silent Warriors, the first authorised account of the famous amphibious commando unit, I realised that, although I was born three years after the end of the events...
King Harald Sigurdsson of Norway, called Hardrada, the Hard Ruler, was a Viking hero straight out of fantasy: an outcast prince who won a fortune, romanced empresses, married a queen, and carved a kingdom for himself with his own blade. He launched the last great...
Abandoned on the banks of the Benin River in 1553, the first English merchants to travel to West Africa could only look back and reflect that, perhaps, their organisational strategy had not been very effective. Things had started well enough, with a painless departure...
I grew up with a passion for the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome, and fondly remember drawing my first Roman chariot with wax crayons on old computer print out paper aged about five! That love of all things ancient translated into something of an obsession as an...
It has to be said that the Paston family was forced to into a permanent struggle against adversity in their ambition to rise from peasant to gentry. Faced with the great magnates in Norfolk, the claims on their estates by men more powerful than themselves, it drove...
Friends! Brothers and sisters! Comrades! Fellow citizens! Your majesties and highnesses! My countrymen! My children! Fellow soldiers! Ladies and gentlemen! You can tell much by the opening of a speech. Elizabeth I begins hers majestically, ‘My loving people’. Mandela...
