The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Our Smolensk excursion was quite an event for me – being my first trip out of Moscow… We were first going down there by car, but then plans were changed and a private train was provided – for us, two Foreign Office press officials and a bevy of N.K.V.D. The train was...
At the core of my postwar mystery Devils in Paradise is a secret code, inserted in a rare book stolen by one of America’s former Code Girls. Although I myself have no head for the work, I’ve long been fascinated by the world of code-breaking and especially its unsung...
When Elizabeth I lay dying in March 1603, England held its breath. Later generations would remember the Tudor succession as smooth, almost serene. But that is hindsight. At the time, many feared – and some expected – civil war. Elizabeth had refused to name her...
While it is often thought that British military engagement in northwestern Europe ended with Waterloo in 1815 and resumed, a century later, with the First World War in 1914 – with a few periods of invasion anxiety surfacing around the middle of the 19th century –the...
One of our most cherished and favourite authors, Gordon Corrigan, passed in the last week. Gordon was a soldier, broadcaster, historian and friend. He wrote, on a variety of periods and subjects, with both scholarship and style. He was one of our most popular guests...
After writing a novel about the French Revolution, my appetite for research had been whetted. Apart from family anecdotes – my father was at Dunkirk and fought in the desert and Italy - I knew shamingly little about the Second World War and decided to do something...
A great deal of garbage has been written regarding 1950s American murderer and ‘body snatcher’/graverobber Ed Gein. Gein (born in 1906) grew up in Plainfield in Wisconsin under the thumb of an - allegedly - religious zealot of a mother; she was his entire world and...
The Business of Conquest In 1756, the East India Company decided to strengthen its position in Kolkata by investing heavily in new fortifications. The Indian city had grown from only a few thousand people to around 400,000 in only fifty years – larger than any town in...
"It is with heavy heart that I tell you we have to cease fighting. Last night, I asked our adversary whether he was prepared, between soldiers, after the struggle and in honour, to seek a way to end hostilities." These were the words of France’s new prime minister,...
'Pug' Ismay was the personification of discretion and diplomacy. His book, The Memoirs of Lord Ismay, is testimony to this: no revelations are included, no confidences betrayed, no secrets exposed. There is hardly an unkind word about any of the people he met or...
