The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
On 24 February 2022, President Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in effect a massive escalation of a war he had begun in 2014 as a direct result of Ukraine’s ‘Revolution of Dignity’ which ousted the authoritarian regime of his ally Viktor...
Land of the Blind is the fictionalised memoir of the author’s time serving in the British Army as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan. The story follows the operational tour of a small unit of four soldiers with a wide range of operational experience, from Chris,...
The majority of the book is set in 2007 but there is a post-script detailing your characters’ involvement in the chaotic coalition departure of 2021. Was it this ending of the coalition efforts that gave you the impetus to publish the book now? I wrote most of the...
NATO’s Greatest Achievement Readers may rightly wonder why NATO, so pre-eminent as Europe’s security foundation, is so timid in its response to Russia’s war on Ukraine. To fully grasp this, we need to look back to NATO’s perhaps greatest achievement, namely its...
Land of the Blind There is a joke in the army that after a conflict we used to have “lessons learned” sessions to ensure we would avoid similar mistakes in the next conflict, but we had to rename “lessons learned” to “lessons identified” as we frequently identified...
To write the history of one regiment covering the years from 1969 to the current day would be no mean task, but here we have a book covering the seven regiments of the Household Division over this same period. It is indeed a tour de force and compulsive reading for...
Adam Staten, what first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? My first novel, Steadfast, was inspired by my experiences serving as a doctor on the front line in Afghanistan. I suppose the first germ of the story took hold whilst I was out there, but it...
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...
