The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Lily Graham’s latest novel, The Last Restaurant in Paris, begins in 1980s France, where living memories of World War Two are slowly fading to just the older generations of the population. Yet when a young librarian, Sabine Dupris, inherits a restaurant from her...
On the 18th of November 1978, the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project – better known as Jonestown – made headline news around the world through the mass murder-suicide of over 900 of its inhabitants, orchestrated by cult leader Jim Jones. In her latest novel, The Girl...
When the Nazis entered Prague in 1942, little did Amelia know how her life would change forever. However, she soon discovered that she could not let their hatred bend her, or even her tiniest hope of surviving Nazi cruelty would become a victim of their homicide will....
The Flame of Resistance is part biography of Josephine Baker and part history of the British and French Secret Services in World War Two. The book focuses on the intelligence war fought across French North Africa, painting both a romantic and brutal portrait of the...
Mission France Was it worth it? In 1941 Hitler issued an order, Nacht und Nebel Erlass, the Night and Fog Decree. This ordered political activists to be ‘disappeared.’ On 6 July, 1944, Sonia Olschanesky, Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, and Andree Borrell, female SOE...
During World War Two, 39 women were specially selected to work in a secretive, clandestine and mainly male domain: the Special Operations Executive, French Section (SOE F). Ranging from housewives and mothers to shop assistants and countesses, these women were put...
In his fascinating book Inheritance, Leo Hollis shines a light on a unique period in English history when, as he puts it, London went from a dilapidated backwater to the largest city in the world, all within the span of a single lifetime. The life in question was that...
London: Origins of a Modern City If there ever was a revolution in 17th century Britain, it did not occur on the battlefields of the 1640s between the forces of the Royalists and the Parliamentarians. It was a slower, more evolutionary transformation that spanned a...
Nadine Akkerman, when first approaching this project, what was your understanding of Elizabeth Stuart and what, as a biographer, drew you to her? My first tussle with Elizabeth Stuart came about when I heard of her love for the theatre – I teach English literature,...
Women's Football and the First World War December 5 2021 marks the 100-year anniversary of women’s football being effectively banned by the FA and it’s progress set back by decades. The ban was finally formally lifted 50 years later in 1971. Although there had been a...
