The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Julian Corbett was born in 1854 and after becoming a barrister in 1877 he practised law until 1882. At that point he turned to writing as a career beginning with historical fiction often with a maritime theme. That led on to commissions to write a couple of...
Books of 2021 from Aspects of HistoryAlan Bardos Author of The Dardanelles ConspiracyLaw of Blood is the first in R.N. Morris’s new Empire of Shadows series, featuring magistrate Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky. In Law of Blood, Virginsky investigates the murder of a...
Sharpe's cavalry sword is still being sheathed into the guts of his enemies. Harper's volley gun is still reverberating like thunder. Wellington is still grumpy. The British army can still fire three shots a minute. And the word "bastard" still litters the air like...
The Dublin Railway Murder On the morning of Friday 14 November 1856 the chief cashier of the Broadstone railway terminus, George Little, failed to report for work. It was out of character for such a conscientious employee to disappear without warning, and his worried...
Napoleon's Hat Joseph J Sullivan’s 1888 music hall song poses a question that has been asked by auction houses around the work since 1815, albeit that the enquiry invariably refers to one specific model of ‘tile’: that worn by Napoléon from 1800, shortly after he...
‘Please just let me see my Johanna again’ – those were the whispered last words of the once towering figure of Otto von Bismarck, breathed out as he lay on his death bed on 30 July 1898. He had spent a lifetime building up a reputation as a tenacious politician with a...
It seems fitting given recent events, to examine the history of jihad in Northeast Africa through the lens of western interventionism. As Warren Dockter, author of Churchill and the Islamic World, puts it: Empire and Jihad is a ‘sobering bridge’ between British...
Rupert Wieloch’s new book, Liberating Libya, colourfully charts the relatively underknown history of Libya and its relationship with Britain. Bringing to bear the author’s full foreign policy expertise, personal knowledge of Libya and extensive research, it is a...
Neil Faulkner, your book opens in 1851 with the explorer and missionary, David Livingstone, who encounters what turns out to be a huge slave trade that stretches from Africa to India. Whilst Britain had abolished slavery in 1833, what were the numbers that were...
The West African slave trade has become a staple of history teaching and popularisation. Rightly so. The triangular trade – trinkets from Europe to Africa, slaves from Africa to the Americas, plantation commodities from the Americas to Europe – was the most visceral...
