The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Long before John Wayne brought the world that walk; long before Clint Eastward flicked his poncho as the Man With No Name, long before the old West was immortalised on the big screen, it had already been framed in the minds of generations of men and women – in a...
Not many people remember Roscoe Conkling these days but from the late 1860s until his resignation from the Senate in 1881 he played a major role in US politics. At six feet three inches tall and of athletic build, Conkling was said to have cast his contemporaries into...
There are iconic images of the end of the Second World War: the Soviet army reclaiming the Reichstag; jubilant sailors embracing their girls; women paraded semi-naked, heads shaved, a placard of shame around their necks. These were the ‘horizontal collaborators,’ the...
What did the Romans ever do for us? As I write this, we are witnessing the chaotic withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan. History will judge whether this 20 year occupation served a purpose for either side. Did the suppression of the Taliban safeguard the West...
If Saint Columba is one of the stars of my series The Chronicles of Iona, Aedan mac Gabran is surely the other. He was the king of the Scots kingdom of Dalriada in the 6th century and was arguably the greatest warlord of his age. In fact, my lightbulb moment in...
In short, Operation Mincemeat is a musical about the great deception by the Allies in WW2 to convince the Germans that British and American forces would land in Sardinia rather than Sicily, when advancing on Italy. The act of misdirection was achieved through the...
All Empires Are Not Alike Look at the reverse of a penny of George the Sixth, father of the present British monarch, and around his head are the words GEORGIUS VI D:G:BR:OMN:REX F.D: IND: IMP. On the other side is Britannia, seated with an oval shield and a spear,...
The corpse was frozen and bleached by the sun. It lay face down in the snow, fully extended and pointing uphill. The upper body was welded to the scree with ice. The arms, still muscular, were outstretched above the head. Mountaineer George Mallory had last been...
The Indian Mutiny of 1857 was more than just a mutiny, although that was how it began. Of the 148 major units (battalions of infantry or regiments of cavalry) of the Bengal Army ninety-three mutinied or were disbanded as likely to mutiny. The Bombay and Madras armies...
It was to be the People’s Will’s most daring act yet. A bomb attack inside the Winter Palace itself. The People’s Will was an extremist revolutionary group active during the reign of Tsar Alexander II. Advocating acts of violence and terror, they sentenced the tsar,...
