The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
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...
Books Click on any of the books covers below to either buy or get more information on AmazonArticles Click on the links below to read the full article[dpdfg_filtergrid custom_query="advanced" use_taxonomy_terms="on" multiple_taxonomies="name_of_author"...
Hi James – your book, The Big Little War, was published just over three years ago. It seems apt that this month marks the 85th anniversary of the coup which led to the extraordinary events that you recount in the book, and you have a new, extended edition of the book...
80 years ago, one of the great courtroom dramas of the 20th century took place in Germany: the Nuremberg trials of the top Nazi leaders. But while the whole world was focusing on events in the court room, a second, less well-known drama was also taking place in their...
On 31st March 1875, Sergei Diaghilev was born into a wealthy Russian family. I salute the man who did so much to haul ballet into the 20th century. My historical novel, Dance of the Earth, spanning 1875 – 1921, is largely set in London. During this tumultuous era,...
