The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The fifteenth century is generally accepted as beginning the Age of Discovery - or at least the discovery of the wider world by European powers. In Spice: The Sixteenth-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World, Roger Crowley has set himself the task of bringing to...
By the summer of 1097 the armies of the First Crusade had captured the Seljuk Turk capital of Nicaea and were moving on towards Jerusalem. In their way stood the fortress city of Antioch. They could not simply march around the city as this would leave a secure,...
AoH Book Club: Sarah Gristwood on the Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe Sarah, what are your thoughts on Game of Queens today, nearly ten years after it was published? It's one of the books of which I am most proud - because I really did feel that for the...
Epic tales: the surprising search for identity and origins in Virgil and Dante At times of trouble and transition, communities will often find a story that brings them together. From the Iliad to the Shahnahmeh, from ʿAntar to Beowulf, epic tales take familiar ideas...
In the introduction to Lest We Forget, Tessa Dunlop writes: “Monuments and statues are inanimate, static entities that depend on their relationship with human beings for relevance and agency.” This statement goes to the heart of this brilliant book. Each monument is...
The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through the Cities at the Heart of Europe This is in many ways a book about the history which history forgot. In it, the cities of central and eastern Europe come alive with a cornucopia of intriguing facts and fascinating...
Theodore Brun, this is the second of your four books and we’re now in 8th century Sweden after Denmark in A Mighty Dawn. How does this story follow on from the first? Pretty directly. In its first draft, both novels formed part of the same enormous manuscript. (I...
Those of you who have read Blood Feud (book 1 of my Rebellion trilogy (though keep an eye out for book 2: Uprising which should be launched in early 2025)), will be aware of Agatho, Thegn Oslac’s Frankish champion-cum-bodyguard and most loyal and deadly of his...
Most historians, including this reviewer, are wary of reading historical fiction. The danger is in overlap. Did one get one’s view of life in the Georgian navy from Admiralty records, or from the pages of Patrick O’Brien? Similarly has one’s opinion of Marshal Marmont...
Paul, we’re in book 2 of your Rebellion series. Can you update readers on where we are at the beginning of Uprising? At the end of book 1 (Blood Feud), we left Oslac back home in his village at Acum, following the successful conclusion of two major plot lines....
