The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The Yasukuni Shrine is an island of calm in an otherwise bustling city. Mature pines and cypress trees surround it, screening it from Tokyo’s relentless traffic noise. Shady walkways, sacred ponds and dozens of cherry trees make it a haven for those who come here to...
Vladislav Zubok, Collapse is a brilliant book and incredibly comprehensive, but there are polar opposite narratives about this historical period which focus (for example) on the nefarious actions of the KGB in Eastern Europe. Did you deliberately avoid exploring the...
A History of Love & Hate in 21 Statues The furore over statues from both sides of the political spectrum can be alienating. There are often legitimate reasons as to why a statue is problematic. Edward Colston’s had gone through a long-running process of...
Judas 62 is largely set in 1993 and the present day so it might be pushing it to describe the book as historical fiction. However the roots of the book are in Russia’s biological warfare programme and its development since the end of the Second World War. Therefore I...
Who ordered the hit on Franz Ferdinand? There are two basic schools of thought about the origins of the plot to assassinate Franz Ferdinand. The first is that it was ordered by Colonel ‘Apis’ Dimitrijevic, the head of Serbian Intelligence, to stop Austro-Hungarian...
Nick Sweet’s Murder in Seville is an intriguing and exciting noir crime novel that draws the reader in. Seville, 1979 (only four years after Franco’s death): Inspector Luis Velasquez is called onto the scene of what seems a brutal homicide: a vet is found dead in his...
As a long-term Russophile with a grudge against the Bolsheviks I jumped at the chance to review this authoritative book, written through the unclouded lens of such an illustrious Russian historian. Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union is enthralling from the get-go,...
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"...
Gorbachev and the Chernobyl Disaster Whatever calculations Mikhail Gorbachev, his Prime Minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and Soviet economists had made for the long term, the catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear plant wrecked everything. The explosion of one of its four...
James Stejskal, your new novel is set around the Iranian revolution and the seizure of the US Embassy – why did you pick this event to write about? It’s an event I experienced first-hand as a member of a Special Forces unit that was involved in the rescue attempt....
