The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
John Sayles Interview I first watched Lone Star soon after it came out in 1996. This atmospheric film, centred on a small-town grappling with its past, is both a whodunnit and a social commentary. The town in question was in Texas and where three communities, White...
James Davey, we’re very used to seeing the Royal Navy as all powerful post-Trafalgar and 1805, but was this the case during the period in which you write about, the 1790s? In short, no! The Navy of the 1790s was wracked by a series of crises and it certainly did not...
Desperate Valour is the sequel to Timothy Ashby’s 5* bestseller Ranger, though it works perfectly well as a ‘stand alone’. It follows the adventure of Major Alexander Charteris (known as ‘Chart’), a mixed-race, English-educated son of an aristocrat and a West Indian...
The New Land, the first novel in The Overstreet Saga, is set during the 1750s on the Maine coast, USA. What excited you to write about this period of upheaval in history? It was a time of great challenges and great potential. For German settlers like the Overstreets,...
David O. Stewart revisits Washington’s political career with two objectives. Half his book examines his subject’s personal and political development before 1775 to show how Washington developed impressive political skills and a clear political agenda. Although most of...
Suzette D. Harrison uses her fiction to re-write the stories we think we know about history, and My Name is Ona Judge is no exception. This is Suzette D. Harrison’s twelfth book, and is based on the true story of one of George and Martha Washington’s slaves: Ona Judge...
George Washington - Commander-in-Chief As he entered Philadelphia on May 9, 1775, to attend the American colonies’ Second Continental Congress, Washington brought his Virginia militia uniform and six copies of the British Army’s standard drill manual to help him train...
Suzette D Harrison, many congratulations on your new novel, My Name Is Ona Judge. It’s based on the experience of Ona Judge, enslaved to the Washington family. How did you find out about her? I’ve a passion for African American History, so much so that my...
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” For many, these are perhaps the most famous, easily...
Attorney and award-winning author David O. Stewart, the Independent’s former president, has long written about history in both nonfiction works and novels. What’s unusual this time around is that his latest book, The New Land, was partly inspired by his own ancestors,...
