The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The Graveyard of Empires: The Soviets Go Into Afghanistan The popular understanding of Cold War history is that the Communist takeover of Afghanistan in 1978 was a continuation of the “Great Game” and engineered by the Soviets, the truth is more complex. The Afghan...
I have read a good deal about the Kennedys, both generally and in research detail when one of my detective novels featured the family patriarch, Joe, as a character. Joe Kennedy was not a very nice man, and he passed on some of his less pleasant characteristics to...
Pirate Irwin, what first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? Summer holidays when I was a nipper in France sparked a fascination with the moral conundrum faced by the people with a war hero Petain having agreed to collaborate with the Nazis to preserve...
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As readers and fans of the site will know, Aspects of History runs a Books of the Year feature each December. There is often a history book which stands out for our board and contributors, such as The World by Simon Sebag-Montefiore and The White Ship by Charles...
Books of 2023 from Aspects of HistoryAlan Bardos Author of The Dardanelles ConspiracyMy book of the year is SAS Forged in Hell. The next instalment of Damien Lewis’ WW II odyssey with the men of 1 SAS, as they become the ‘tip of the spear’ in the invasion of Sicily...
As Tessa Dunlop says in her introduction, when she began to write Elizabeth and Philip, she did not expect the story to end so definitively with Queen Elizabeth’s death, despite her great age. The monarch had lost her husband of seventy-three years in 2021; he had...
On the day I meet with Simon Sebag Montefiore to discuss his new book, The World: A Family History, the Russians have plundered the body of Prince Grigory Potemkin who was the subject of Sebag’s breakthrough book in 2001. Catherine the Great & Potemkin (Aspects of...
An expansive, enlightening, and entertaining history of some of humanity’s most interesting characters. The first thing worth mentioning about Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s The World is that it wholly delivers on the promise of its title and its synopsis. If you are by...
Gretchen Friemann, your recent book, The Treaty, dealt with the negotiations for the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. As an Australian though living in Dublin, why did you want to write about them? The idea for the book came from a chance encounter in an archive. A few years...
