The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Nuclear Near Misses A couple of years ago I spotted an interesting tweet from Tim Harford, pointing me to an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that told the extraordinary story of a group of missilemen on Okinawa who were ordered to launch their...
How do you write a thriller when everyone knows the ending? This was the question that dogged me over the five years of writing my latest thriller, Traitor’s Gate. It’s a reasonable question. However interesting the plot, however fascinating the characters, a...
The last few years have seen people across the world being displaced in unprecedented numbers. As the entry to Europe Greece has been all but overwhelmed by the influx of refugees arriving on its shores, but the Greeks themselves have their own deep history of...
In my life today I have no servants living in my house. The work done by servants in previous centuries is now done by machines, or automation has rendered it unnecessary. For a historical fiction writer the presence of servants in the house is a massive opportunity...
Richard ForemanRobert Tombs produced one of the finest history books of the last five years, in the form of The English and their History. I am suitably looking forward to his new book, This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe. It will no doubt be full of...
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John le Carré may have a few rivals when selecting the greatest novelist of the late 20th century (there are arguments to be made for Graham Greene, Tom Wolfe, and Philip Roth, among others) but he certainly has no superior. Le Carré was not just a chronicler of the...
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For Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, the spectacular collapse of the British Empire after the Second World War was like a bereavement. It even followed — almost to the letter — the classic sequence of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, finally,...
