The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Alexander the Great in the Dock At The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in London, on 26th October 2022, Alexander the Great stood accused of terrible crimes against humanity, the indictment of which can be found here. I witnessed the televised proceedings as...
Five Questions on War: 1. Does our biology explain why we have war? I say No: war is not engrained in us (but feel free to disagree with me and lots will). Biology might explain why we sometimes lash out violently when we are angry or afraid, but not why we have...
Summer Reads from Aspects of HistoryTimothy Ashby Author of Elizabethan Secret Agent: The Untold Story of William Ashby (1536-1593)At the top of my favourites list of recent historical books is Leanda de Lisle´s The White King. Although non-fiction, the book reads...
CVHF Highlights So Far Monday 20th June Power & Privilege: A Recent History Simon Kuper (author of Chums) & Richard Beard (Sad Little Men) discussed the corrosive impact of public schools and Oxford University on recent British political life. Their discussion...
The numbers are grim. Worldwide, nearly five million have contracted Covid-19; nearly 320,000 have died from it. Public health experts caution that those numbers are certainly undercounts. Some deaths are mistakenly attributed to underlying conditions, not...
Books of 2021 from Aspects of HistoryAlan Bardos Author of The Dardanelles ConspiracyLaw of Blood is the first in R.N. Morris’s new Empire of Shadows series, featuring magistrate Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky. In Law of Blood, Virginsky investigates the murder of a...
“Very few battles actually change history”, posits Gordon Corrigan in his latest book Tipping Points of History: The Battle of Aegospotami. Intriguing the reader from the outset, he goes on to explain how inaccurately the phrase ‘crossroads of history’ is applied to...
Simon Elliott is a busy man. When he's not appearing in documentaries, working as an archaeologist and lecturing in Pompeii, he is a prolific writer of ancient Roman history, most recently with an account of the IX Hispania (Roman Britain's Missing Legion). He's now...
Simon Elliott, the epic clashes of the Trojan War described by Homer are our only real literary reference to the Mycenaean period of warfare – how would you best describe this version of Greek war? In one word, confusing! Here we first have to overcome the uncertainty...
There is a possibly apocryphal story about the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. It goes like this. Someone congratulated Rowan Atkinson about his portrayal of Mr Bean bumbling about amidst the antics of the parachuting Queen and the visitation of James...
