The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Churchill’s Citadel When Winston Churchill saw a house on a hill called Chartwell, it was love at first sight, but not with the house itself. It was the landscape, first seen by him on a beautiful summer’s day in 1921, that captivated him. Its situation on a hillside,...
Mark, many congratulations on the new book. There is a lot of myth surrounding Russia’s history, not least from Vladimir Putin. How much of its military past is in the average Russian’s consciousness? More, honestly, than we might anticipate from a Western standpoint....
Alec Marsh on Cut and Run Alec, another book so soon - what's going on? It’s like the rural bus network – you wait for years for one to arrive, and the two turn up at once… The truth is that Cut and Run is a story that I’ve been working on for a very long time. It was...
One could be excused for thinking that a travel guide on the Holocaust would be in bad taste. Having read Rosie Whitehouse’s excellent, The Holocaust: A Guide to Europe’s Sites, Memorial & Museums I can assure you that nothing is further from the truth. One of the...
January 2025 will be the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, a single event which has come to symbolise the Holocaust. No-one could claim that in the eighty years since there’s been a shortage of literature on the Holocaust: a search on...
Pirate, The Redeemed Detective is the latest of your Inspector Lafarge novels, but we’re now in 1947 and he’s been through much. How has his character changed since The Tortured Detective which starts in 1942? He has certainly been through the wringer, emotionally...
Goodnight Vienna, Jane Thynne Interview. Jane, many congratulations on Midnight in Vienna. What is it about the city that made you want to set much of the book there? It’s impossible to think about twentieth century art, philosophy, psychology, or politics and not to...
As we reach the end of the year Aspects of History selects the title that stood out above the rest published during 2024. Past books that have won include The World by Simon Sebag-Montefiore, The White Ship by Charles Spencer, and last year's Conflict, by General...
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...
Old Delhi to New: A Murderous History of India’s Capital City Go to Delhi these days and you’ll be hit by a slew of jokes about the city’s choking smog. Gallows humour, perhaps, but you can sense a certain grim determination by Delhiites to persevere in the face of...
