The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Imagine driving along a quiet countryside road in England or Germany. It is a sunny day, and the surroundings are calm, with only the sound of the car’s engine, birdsong, and the occasional gust of wind. Then you see a detour near a town or in a remote area pointing...
Since the end of the Second World War the Third Reich and the characters of its leaders have been dissected, dismembered, analysed, scrutinised, evaluated, judged and generally examined producing a plethora of books, some academic and scholarly, some populist, some...
It’s perhaps true that for some of us, our understanding of early 17th century England stems from the closing chapters of classroom textbooks on the Tudors, often ending with the infamous Gunpowder Plot. Paying in Blood, however, draws our focus away from familiar...
Views on age and life’s milestones have changed over time. In the last century average life expectancy exceeded what we would call middle age for the first time and in the process changed perspectives. Empress Matilda, one of the subjects of Eighteen, married Henry V...
The Great Siege of Malta, by Marcus Bull The military phenomenon of the siege, Marcus Bull reminds us, has a long history in the western literary tradition. And yet, despite their famous literary instances, such as the siege of Jericho as detailed in the Old Testament...
A Death in Berlin is the third instalment of Simon Scarrow’s excellent Berlin Noir series featuring Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke. A former racing car driver turned police detective. It’s May 1940, the Second World War is less than a year old and its all quiet on...
Keith Lowe has built a well-deserved reputation in recent years as a chronicler of the interface between military operations and civil society, especially once the fighting on a battlefield has ended. For instance, his ‘Savage Continent’ tracked the long, wearying...
Damien Lewis's third instalment of his SAS 'greatest escapes of World War II series is a corker. It has all the elements Lewis 'readers have come to expect, painstaking research carefully blended with firsthand accounts that allow the men concerned to tell their...
The fifteenth century is generally accepted as beginning the Age of Discovery - or at least the discovery of the wider world by European powers. In Spice: The Sixteenth-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World, Roger Crowley has set himself the task of bringing to...
The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance that Won the War What British diplomat earned his place in history by penning a note to his superior in London commenting mischievously on the name of his Turkish counterpart, Mustapha Kunt? You've guessed it:...
