The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Hello Simon. Your book, Death to Order, suggests that assassination is as much about signalling as it is about elimination. How important is the message sent by a killing compared to the actual removal of a target? It depends on the kind of assassination campaign. The...
Whether you are interested in being introduced to British history, or you are familiar with it, Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee, will prove to be a find. Borne out of a successful podcast of the same name, Charlie Higson has written a book which entertains and educates in...
Andrew Taylor, A Schooling in Murder, sees you revisit to the 20th century, the dying embers of WW2 and a rural setting. Give us a brief outline of your most recent book. It’s a Golden Age whodunit set in a third-rate girls’ boarding school in the closing months of...
There is something fitting in the idea of a photographer spy. Both espionage and photography require close attention to detail, an awareness of perspective, and an ability to manipulate reality. Sometimes, usefully, the activities overlap. Perhaps the most influential...
On 28 June 1914, a collection of Bosnian terrorists gathered in Sarajevo to target the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, Franz Ferdinand. It was a chaotic operation, with the first go not even attempted. A later grenade missed the Archduke’s motorcar and instead...
The 1920s and 30s were a golden age for American foreign correspondents in Europe. Until 1920, American newspapers had taken most of their international news from press agencies such as Associated Press. But during the 1920s, American papers started relying on their...
In George Orwell: Life and Legacy, Robert Colls provides a sharp and very lively examination of the man born Eric Arthur Blair, exploring how a "lower upper middle class" Etonian transformed into the world’s defining political writer of the twentieth century. Colls...
What first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? As a student of German literature, I wrote my PhD thesis on the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, whose life and work spanned the decades from the 1860s to the 1940s. It was a period dense with momentous...
Who was Edith Tudor-Hart? For a long time, and especially after the revelation of her crucial role in the creation of modern Britain's most notorious spy ring – the Cambridge Five – she existed more as a cipher than as a real person. I first encountered her name well...
