The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
A night in a bed, if not a cure to stem the swells of insomnia, helped. Tuesday had been sapping and the idea of escaping the site, shade at a premium under the midsummer sun, attractive when a schoolmate invited me to stay in the neighbouring village. My father and...
The referee blows the starting whistle and Chile launches into action. The ball is driven forward by the footwork of Captain Francisco Valdés. Behind him is the team’s back line, led by Elías Figueroa. Orchestrating the attack in midfield is the best man among them,...
A recent article in The Guardian featured a new book of short stories by Colm Tóibín: “Tóibín’s short stories, particularly in his 2026 collection The News from Dublin, are fundamentally concerned with exploring the internal and external lives of characters living at...
Welcome back, Giles – we’re exactly two years on from the release of The Stalin Affair, and that question of the nature of diplomacy between allies seems ever more relevant in recent weeks and months in 2026. The ‘impossible alliance’ you discuss between Franklin D....
What first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? I have always been interested in postwar history, particularly the Cold War-era in my own country, Sweden. It was a dangerous time, marked by pragmatic and secret cooperation with Nato to protect the...
When I first met historian Andrew Roberts, who wrote the foreword to my forthcoming book The Stay Behinds: Sweden’s Cold War Guardians, he asked: "How do you even research a stay-behind network?" Highly secret stay-behind groups were established across NATO-aligned...
Who was Edith Tudor-Hart? For a long time, and especially after the revelation of her crucial role in the creation of modern Britain's most notorious spy ring – the Cambridge Five – she existed more as a cipher than as a real person. I first encountered her name well...
John – your book, General Hastings 'Pug' Ismay: Soldier, Statesman, Diplomat was published nearly two years ago. Can you give us an outline of the life of ‘Pug’ Ismay, a man you describe as ‘an unusual subject for a biography’? Who was he, and provide us with some...
