The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Napoleon's Birthday Napoleon was born on 15 August, 1769. Under the Gregorian calendar this date was a holiday celebrating the Ascension of the Virgin Mary. The French Revolutionaries introduced a new calendar on 5 October, 1793, backdated to 22 September, 1792, the...
I was not completely sure, when asked to review this book, whether 300 pages or so on Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen would be my sort of thing. I am interested in Georgian and Regency History but that interest tends more towards the political and the...
CHF 2024: Day 5 Cassino ’44, James Holland The searing sun gave way to cooler cloudier weather on Friday, the day of the military big beasts, James Holland, Max Hastings, Saul David and Anthony Beevor. James Holland’s account of the battle of Monte Cassino follows in...
CHF 2024: Day 4 Ukraine: Rhetoric & Reality: Francis Dearnley, David Knowles, Hanna Shelest, Dominic Nicholls The formidable team from the Telegraph’s Ukraine podcast attracted one of the biggest turnouts as they tackled the gap between rhetoric and reality in the...
CHF 2024: Day 3 The Chalk Stream, Feargal Sharkey Undertones singer Feargal Sharkey gave what might have been the most anticipated talk of the festival, telling the story of how England’s unique chalk streams are dying because of negligence by the privatised water...
CHF 2024: Day 2 The first two mornings of the festival are given over to the excellent schools’ programme. Busloads of youngsters descend on the site and get a special programme of talks and tours. The accompanying teachers all report game changing levels of new...
CHF 2024: Day 1 The festival site looked resplendent in the dappled June light, bouts of sunshine alternating with welcome cloud cover and a gentle breeze. Regular visitors will notice some changes to the layout. The Evelyn Partners tent has moved and is now a giant...
Izabela Czartoryska The joy of taking on a subject not previously covered by historians is that one can approach it with an open mind, uncovering and assessing virgin sources like an archaeologist. With subjects such as the Congress of Vienna or Napoleon one struggles...
Summer Reads from Aspects of HistoryAlan Bardos Author of Rising TideMunich Wolf, by Rory Clements is set in 1935 Munich. When the body of a young English socialite is found, Kripo detective Sebastian Wolff is called in to solve the politically sensitive case. The...
Angus Konstam, many congratulations on the new book. Before the prologue we see wonderful maps that evoke the romantic locations of the period: the Caribbean, West Africa, the eastern seaboard of the American colonies, the Florida keys and of course the Bahamas. What...
