The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Thomas Messel, what first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? The focus of my study was a late eighteenth-century ancestor called Elizabeth Linley. I was aware that she eloped with and married the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, but initially, I...
Santa, your latest book, Secrets of the Starlit Sea, has recently been published. By our calculations that makes it your 32nd book since Meet Me Under the Ombu Tree back in 2001. Do you have a favourite? It’s very hard to choose a favourite because at the time of...
Alex, this is the second novel in the series. What has happened since the end of Every Spy a Traitor and the beginning of The Second Traitor? The most important thing which has happened is that the Second World War is now underway – the first book ends on the day...
Gretchen, your book, The Treaty, dealt with the negotiations for the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. As an Australian who lives in Dublin, why did you want to write about them? The idea for the book came from a chance encounter in an archive. While I was studying for a...
Gautam Hazarika, what first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? I had always been interested in WW2, primarily Britain’s war against Nazi Germany, but not in the Far East, even after living 20 years in Singapore where so much of it happened at my...
Paul Beaver, your new book is on Reginald Mitchell, the aviation engineer who designed the Spitfire. What was special about Mitchell? Mitchell was a very special engineer. At Supermarine, he fostered the right balance of experience and innovation, which for a small...
Trial by Battle: Max Hastings Interviewed Max, it wasn't long since we discussed your last book Operation Biting and you've already produced this fantastic book, Sword. How do you do it? I'm an old man in a hurry, but there's lots of things I still want to say about...
Anne O'Brien on The Queen and the Countess Anne, many congratulations on the new novel. We’re in England in the early 1450s and just at the start of the Wars of the Roses. Queen Margaret and Anne, Countess of Warwick are the main two characters. What was the genesis...
Karl, Operation Nightfall is a sequel, after your first, Grown Men Cry Out at Night. What’s happened between the two novels? Historically speaking, quite a bit. My first novel, Grown Men Cry Out at Night was set in Bremen, Germany in 1946. The war in Europe had just...
A Prince Among Men: Michael Jones Interviewed by Richard Foreman Can you tell us about the origin of the idea for you to write a biography of the Black Prince, or Edward of Woodstock? As a military historian, my publishers’ interest in a new biography of the Black...
