The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
For Karl Marx, Napoleon III was a “grotesque mediocrity”; Victor Hugo lambasted him as “Napoleon the little”; Alexis de Tocqueville, in what was not the famed political theorist’s most sophisticated analysis, dismissed him as a “dwarf”. Yet these men underestimated...
Hitler believed in the Darwinian struggle for existence. Life did not, could not, exist without conflict. All too soon after his ascent into power, and initially, Europe got to experience the consequences of his grim and aggressive political beliefs. In Great Britain,...
If I had never been to Tibet, I might have found it difficult to understand the Tibetan riots that broke out in Lhasa in 2008. Nor would I have felt such a powerful urge to complete my novel, A Tibetan Girl Called Ata, a tragic cross-cultural love story that unfolds...
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...
