The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The Story of Berlin One of the great European cities, even before the fall of the wall Berlin has been unique in Germany. The author of a new history of the city describes its exceptional nature within the wider German state. ‘Berlin is home to such an audacious set...
Alex Gerlis, what prompted you to choose the period that you wrote your first book in? The Best of Our Spies was the first of my (nine) novels and I wrote it after I covered the 50th Anniversary of D-Day for the BBC in 1994. I spent some time out in Normandy and...
Vladislav Zubok, Collapse is a brilliant book and incredibly comprehensive, but there are polar opposite narratives about this historical period which focus (for example) on the nefarious actions of the KGB in Eastern Europe. Did you deliberately avoid exploring the...
Judas 62 is largely set in 1993 and the present day so it might be pushing it to describe the book as historical fiction. However the roots of the book are in Russia’s biological warfare programme and its development since the end of the Second World War. Therefore I...
As a long-term Russophile with a grudge against the Bolsheviks I jumped at the chance to review this authoritative book, written through the unclouded lens of such an illustrious Russian historian. Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union is enthralling from the get-go,...
Gorbachev and the Chernobyl Disaster Whatever calculations Mikhail Gorbachev, his Prime Minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and Soviet economists had made for the long term, the catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear plant wrecked everything. The explosion of one of its four...
James Stejskal, your new novel is set around the Iranian revolution and the seizure of the US Embassy – why did you pick this event to write about? It’s an event I experienced first-hand as a member of a Special Forces unit that was involved in the rescue attempt....
Appointment in Tehran is the second book in James Stejskal’s Snake Eater Chronicle series of novels which features a large cast of characters and despite the fact it doesn’t have a main protagonist to follow but several it still manages to be deeply engrossing. That...
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...
There have been so many biographies of Ian Fleming that surely there cannot be room for yet another? But Oliver Buckton has demonstrated that there is. Through his extensive research he has succeeded admirably in providing an extraordinary major new study of Fleming...
