The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
John, congratulations on the publication of your new novel Target Arnhem. It’s a great World War II story, combining battlefield action with a nail biting espionage plot. Could you tell us a bit about the different storylines? Thank you Alan. This is the second book...
Founded by Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple was a cult with ideological radical political, religious and racial aims. In an attempt to create a socialist utopia, Jones established a remote agricultural project settlement in Guyana, known as Jonestown. Here, under Jones’...
Amidst stiff competition from his fellow tyrants Reinhard Heydrich has a strong claim to be the 20th century’s most evil monster: even an awed Adolf Hitler called him ‘the man with the Iron heart’. For when this tall blonde epitome of the Nazi Aryan ideal was...
Diana, many congratulations on your new book, the story of ‘André’ Joseph Scheinmann. How did you find out about this extraordinary man? His son and I were classmates at Harvard, though we never met at university there. When Michel discovered, in our 25th reunion...
I Am André Cher Camarade ... mon capitaine ... mon lieutenant ... Monsieur Le Neveu ... 31AQ ... MI6 #99421 ... #4368 at Natzweiler and #101739 at Dachau ... Martin ... Turquoise ... interprète ... Herr Dolmetscher ... 0419064, French Liaison Officer ... Agent from C...
Review: Kate Barton’s Fast In today’s society, questionable holistic health trends, hapless weight-loss pills, and the latest Ozempic craze, have capitalised modern medicine, influenced by uninformed celebrities and social media. Nonetheless, such medicinal...
Annie Dawid on Paradise Undone Annie, why did you want to write about Jonestown? In the 1980s, two friends disappeared into a cult. Later, I met others whose friends also vanished, some dying in their chosen communities, like Heaven’s Gate. Our friends who joined...
The Wedding to End All Weddings – 20 November 1947 Big puffy fairytale nuptials that establish a new royal name overnight - Diana, Fergie, Kate, Meghan - are now considered standard fare but a large celebrity-style wedding is a relatively recent confection. Pomp and...
At its greatest extant under the rule of Suleyman the Magnificent in the 1500s, the Ottoman Empire ran from the walls of Vienna (to which it laid siege in 1529 all the way across eastern Europe and the Middle East to Baghdad and Basra. From Algiers the tughra of the...
Jonestown: Paradise Undone “The first body I saw was off to the side, alone. Five more steps and I saw another and another and another; hundreds of bodies. The Newsweek reporter was walking around saying, “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.” Another guy said,...
