The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
CHF 2025: Day 3 FROM UTMOST EAST TO UTMOST WEST: CONQUEST OF THE BLUE NILE, John Blashford-Snell JBS, as he is known, is up there with Rannulph Fiennes as a proper adventurer. King Charles is a fan and encouraged him to set up Operation Raleigh, a charity sending...
Chalke Hist Fest - Tuesday This is Solstice-Land in June after all and so waking up at 5am because of the light is to be expected. A couple of hours dozing as the lightest of rain tapped at the canvas above and I emerge for a remarkably warm shower. Having gone to...
CHF 2025: Day 2 THERE AND BACK: DIARIES 1999-2009 Michael Palin moderated by Michael Neiberg Michael Palin is a national treasure, and he entertained a packed Guildhall tent to recollections from a life of adventure. He was keen to point out the difference between...
Chalke Hist Fest - Monday Driving through Fovant and past the Badges, we were all set for a sunny if gusty day. The roads seemed unusually busy for mid-afternoon in the Wiltshire villages. Quickly setting up tent on the flat top of the chalk down, the immaculate PVC...
CHF 2025: Day 1 Whoever gets first billing at Chalke sets the tone for the week-long festival. Last year it was Giles Milton and Stalin (Russia must have been top of mind in 2024 for some reason!). This year it was the English Civil War. In REVOLUTION &...
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...
Nelson: Hero of the Seas, by Dominic Sandbrook On 24 September 1805, Admiral Horatio Nelson was waiting for an audience with Lord Castlereagh, Secretary for War and the Colonies, at the Colonial Office. In the assembly room with him was Sir Arthur Wellesley, who had...
On the 13th November 1715, two battles took place concurrently on British soil. The first, at Sherrifmuir in Scotland, saw John Erskine, 6th Earl of Mar, with a Jacobite army of 12,000 men engage with a far smaller government force under the 2nd Duke of Argyll. After...
On a grey evening last autumn in the outer concourse of drab Euston Station, I took pity on two teachers and their assistants who were corralling a large group of school-children. I offered them a distraction. We moved across to one of the two statues – not that of...
Napoleon’s Brush With ‘Black Spartacus’ The Haitian revolution was one of the defining episodes in modern global history. It began in 1791 with a mass uprising of the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue, France’s richest and most profitable colony. Drawing upon local...
