The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
On the morning of the 19th November 1978 I entered my classroom at the Alliance Française in Paris, where I was attending a course in advanced French. A few minutes later our teacher, M. Beaulieu, strode in. Instead of his usual jovial ‘Bonjour, bonjour tout le monde’...
Tony Shaw, many congrats on the new book. First off, Selection. There are TV shows about this now, but asking for a friend, if one keeps themselves fit in the gym and running regularly (perhaps with the odd marathon), surely, as long as you don’t give up, passing...
Three years ago, while standing at the urinal in The Gallery pub in Pimlico, it suddenly struck me that if I didn’t see a nightingale or a turtledove soon, I probably never would. It isn’t the sort of place I usually have revelations but three pints in, I was hung up...
The assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP on June 22nd 1922 was a profoundly shocking event in British and Irish history. There had not been an assassination in Britain of a sitting MP since the prime minister Spencer Perceval who was killed in 1812....
The Journey Down In May 1982, my commanding officer unexpectedly asked me if I would like to go on an all expenses paid luxury cruise to the Falkland Islands, attached to the HQ element of 5th Infantry Brigade, aboard the grandest liner afloat: Queen Elizabeth II. The...
Bologna, Italy. November 1920. Ennio Gnudi was a humble railway worker. He was also a revolutionary communist. In the recent local elections, he had been elected to the council. Now, he had risen to be Mayor of the city. The Socialist Party’s radical left was about to...
As soon as I picked up this book I knew it was a brilliant idea, and wondered why no-one had thought to do it before. The answer lies in the book itself, which is that the amount of research taken is enormous. Writing as an amateur, and not a historian, it is a...
SAS South Georgia Boating Club began life as a war diary kept by me in a notebook during the Falklands War in 1982. Many years later, and with the encouragement of my grown-up son, this became the nucleus of an idea to write my life story with the war diary sandwiched...
Margaret Willes, what inspired you to write about this subject, a book not about the cathedral, but about its surrounding area? My first memory of St Paul's Churchyard was emerging from the Underground into an area of devastation. It was probably in 1953, when my...
Simon Medhurst, congratulations on the new book, which I think is your first. There’s an interesting story behind it, can you tell us about your grandfather Robert Hichens? First thank you for the kind words, yes my first book. It has been 6 years in the making. I...
