The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Within the pages of Women of SOE, there are many incredible stories reflecting every human trait from heroism to cowardice, bravery to fear, love to betrayal, loyalty to selfishness. The book's aim is to show these women (and the men they worked with) as human beings,...
In my new biography of Empress Matilda, I have emphasised Matilda’s capacity for collaboration with the men surrounding her, revealing her concomitant skill of persuasion and negotiation. Nevertheless, it is clear from her life story that there were moments that these...
When we think of the Crusades, the first things that come to mind are 12th-century characters such as Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, locked in combat for control of the Holy Land. The average medieval person, though, would have had a much richer understanding...
The western Roman Empire collapsed so long ago that we might well ask ‘why should that matter to us now?’. Yet, in multiple ways, our lives are conditioned, still, by those events. Take language, for example. Mostly, the western Empire spoke Latin. Despite substantial...
The International Settlement of Shanghai was a city within a city, an island of Western lifestyle dominated by the British and American concessions, which were ruled by an Anglo-American council. South of the settlement was the French Concession, where many wealthy...
55BC, as Sellar and Yeatman knew, is “the first date in English history”. Caesar led his legions across the sea and gave the Britons a thrashing. This, of course, was “a Good Thing, since the Britons were only natives at that time.” Caesar could hardly have put it any...
Philip Larkin in his poem Annus Mirabilis highlighted the year 1963 as a time of momentous transition. The end of the Lady Chatterley ban, the rise of The Beatles, the beginnings of the sexual revolution, all seductive ingredients for me, an author writing a novel...
I’m frequently asked how much of my novel Sawadika American Girl is drawn from real life. A work of historical fiction, it is the story of a 17-year-old American woman coming-of-age in 1968 Thailand when the country served as a major US military outpost for America’s...
Consider a boy. His name is Vasilli Ivanovich Bardeish. He has a weak chin, and jug ears which stick out sideways from his head. In May 1951, he is 22 years old. Vasilli has had the great misfortune to be born in Ukraine in 1929. To two vicious totalitarian dictators...
The Japanese Imperial Navy conducted extensive intelligence gathering in Hawaii as part of its preparations for the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, using a spy attached to their consulate named Takeo Yoshikawa. Yoshikawa meticulously gathered vital intelligence on the...
