The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The music in my ears was Elgar’s Nimrod and Tallis’ Fantasia theme by Vaughan Williams. The sun was absent, hidden behind a cloudy sky as the giant 15 inch naval guns pointed towards the heavens and I arrived in the gardens of the Imperial War Museum. With a sense of...
Found is the debut novel from Will Erikson. It is set in 2003 in the chaotic aftermath of the coalition invasion of Iraq. Told in the first person, the protagonist, Harry Smith, is a junior officer in the UK intelligence services who is deployed to Iraq as part of the...
Vladimir Putin clearly fancies himself something of a historian – even if, as a professional historian, I feel much of his ‘work’ would struggle to get a passing grade, laden as it is with factual inaccuracies and the careful cherry picking of evidence to fit his...
Will Erikson on Found Will many congratulations on the new book. There is plenty to ask about here, since this was such a major event in Britain’s recent history. Is that why you wanted to write it? Thank you. Very much so, it was divisive at the time, and it turned...
Chasing Shadows In the summer of 2003, I was one of around 1,200 American, British, and Australian intelligence personnel sent to Baghdad to form the Iraq Survey Group (ISG). The task of this unprecedented field intelligence operation was simple: locate the Weapons of...
By 10pm on the night of 9th June 1983 BBC Television centre was humming. In Studio Two, amid a beige version of the set from Alien, David Dimbleby and Robin Day were about to start the election results show, though everybody already knew Thatcher was going to walk it....
Mark, many congratulations on the new book. There is a lot of myth surrounding Russia’s history, not least from Vladimir Putin. How much of its military past is in the average Russian’s consciousness? More, honestly, than we might anticipate from a Western standpoint....
The Admiral’s Eyes The little pocket notebook is easily missed amongst the Nelson manuscripts in the British Library. In it the admiral noted every alteration of course, with the depth-sounding taken as the Victory came onto a fresh tack, leading the Mediterranean...
The Wedding to End All Weddings – 20 November 1947 Big puffy fairytale nuptials that establish a new royal name overnight - Diana, Fergie, Kate, Meghan - are now considered standard fare but a large celebrity-style wedding is a relatively recent confection. Pomp and...
Every work of fiction starts with a single idea. An assassin hired to kill a president (The Day Of The Jackal), an elderly fisherman who loses his prize to a shark (The Old Man And The Sea), a doctor who transforms into a beast at night and commits murder (Jekyll and...
