The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Napoleon's Birthday Napoleon was born on 15 August, 1769. Under the Gregorian calendar this date was a holiday celebrating the Ascension of the Virgin Mary. The French Revolutionaries introduced a new calendar on 5 October, 1793, backdated to 22 September, 1792, the...
Izabela Czartoryska The joy of taking on a subject not previously covered by historians is that one can approach it with an open mind, uncovering and assessing virgin sources like an archaeologist. With subjects such as the Congress of Vienna or Napoleon one struggles...
Regency England – roughly speaking from the 1780s to the 1820s – has become identified as an age of elegance, romance and glamour. The immense success of the TV and film adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels and imitations such as Bridgerton, building on ideas already...
Summer Reads from Aspects of HistoryAlan Bardos Author of Rising TideMunich Wolf, by Rory Clements is set in 1935 Munich. When the body of a young English socialite is found, Kripo detective Sebastian Wolff is called in to solve the politically sensitive case. The...
Napoleon’s Invasion of Egypt At dawn on 30 June 1798 French soldiers, peering out from the impressive fleet that had brought them across the Mediterranean, sighted what some called a tower, and others a mosque, on the Egyptian coast south-west of Alexandria. The...
Books Click on any of the books covers below to either buy or get more information on Amazon From the Publisher Chiselbury Publishing was founded 2011 to make the works of James Leasor, one of the bestselling and most prolific British authors of the second half of the...
History has not been kind to Caroline Lamb. The writer and lover of Lord Byron, who characterised him as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, has generally been dismissed by his biographers, and those of her husband, William Lamb, the future Lord Melbourne, as an...
It’s one of history’s greatest myths: Napoleon Bonaparte was short. This is not quite true. In 1815 an English captain described him as “a remarkably strong, well-built man, about five feet seven inches high”. He was above average height of the time, and would have...
Ben Kane we're here to talk about your new book, Napoleon’s Spy, and the Napoleonic era, and actually it's very timely because there's the Ridley Scott movie. Firstly, Scott has said that people who complain about his film being historically inaccurate ‘need to get a...
John Brewer’s historically rich Volcanic: Vesuvius in the Age of Revolution takes readers on a fascinating journey through the history of Mount Vesuvius. Brewer carefully plots the changing attitudes towards Naples and Mount Vesuvius through the lens of the Sublime...
