The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
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...
Vladimir Putin clearly fancies himself something of a historian – even if, as a professional historian, I feel much of his ‘work’ would struggle to get a passing grade, laden as it is with factual inaccuracies and the careful cherry picking of evidence to fit his...
David Stoddart is a well-respected town councillor with a troubling thrill addiction. By day, he’s a successful businessman and pillar of local society. But as darkness falls, Stoddart slips out of his house to prowl the streets of The Old Town, committing burglaries...
Books of 2023 from Aspects of HistoryAlan Bardos Author of The Dardanelles ConspiracyIt’s been a great year for fiction and non-fiction, but these books are my first amongst equals. Every Spy a Traitor by Alex Gerlis follows Agent Archie, a Russian mole in MI6 across...
Justin, A Leap in the Dark is a historical novel set in the criminal underworld of Edinburgh. Why did you want to write it? I grew up in Scotland and spent part of my youth in Edinburgh, which had and still has a strong hold on my imagination. A Leap In the Dark is...
Between the end of the Renaissance and the start of the Enlightenment, Europe lived through an era known as the Age of Reason. This was a period which saw widespread advances in the arts and sciences. Artists such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Van Dyk flourished across...
In 1732 Thomas Fairfax, the sixth Lord Fairfax of Cameron, was reading the Gentleman’s Magazine obituary of the agent to his lands in Virginia, Robert Carter. To his astonishment he discovered Carter was worth, in those days, £10,000 and so Fairfax immediately began...
