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Chalke Daily: Hobnobbing and the Hottest of Takes

Chalke Daily: Hobnobbing and the Hottest of Takes

Infernal temperatures as the programme kicks off properly

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...

Chalke Daily: Storm Clouds and Scaramucci

Chalke Daily: Storm Clouds and Scaramucci

We’re back in Wiltshire on the first day of the UK’s largest festival devoted to history!

And it feels oh-so-familiar, cosy even. Editor-at-large, Justin Doherty, and I began proceedings with the hour-long drive down from Somerset, a nervous sort of excitement as we discussed the line-up and prognosticated about just how searing it could get this week....

Stealing Hitler’s Rocket: The Incredible Mission to Smuggle a V-2 Rocket Out of Nazi-Occupied Europe to Britain, by Guy Walters

Stealing Hitler’s Rocket: The Incredible Mission to Smuggle a V-2 Rocket Out of Nazi-Occupied Europe to Britain, by Guy Walters

In 1943 Allied reconnaissance identified a major military development site on the Baltic coast, and so began a complex and hazardous smuggling mission of supersonic weaponry.
Trevor James

This is a very engaging book, written in a very accessible style, and this remarkable book does far more than its title suggests. From a personal perspective, having been born in 1946 in Croydon, I grew up acutely conscious of the ‘presence’ of multiple bomb sites....

The Big Debrief  – Review

The Big Debrief – Review

At its inaugural conference, Britain at War brought together leading historians and broadcasters for a day of lively discussion.

Britain at War magazine held its inaugural conference, The Big Debrief, on 6th June. The event was perfectly set in the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds. The first speaker at this fascinating event was Jonathan Ferguson, Keeper of Firearms & Artillery at the Royal...

Empire’s Witness: A Soldier’s Secret War Diary 1942-5, by Philip James Day

Empire’s Witness: A Soldier’s Secret War Diary 1942-5, by Philip James Day

A moving and beautifully crafted blend of wartime memoir, transforming one soldier’s forgotten journal into an extraordinary journey across the British Empire and back home again.
Gautam Hazarika

Empire's Witness is not just about Corporal Day's war, but also about its rediscovery by his grandson, Emmy-winning filmmaker Philip James Day. Decades after the soldier’s death, Philip was in Yorkshire for his daughter’s wedding and almost by chance came across his...

Watching the Detectives: An Aspects of Crime Short Story Collection

Watching the Detectives: An Aspects of Crime Short Story Collection

Watching the Detectives is an exciting and engaging anthology that combines crime writing, psychological suspense and science fiction.
Grace Brown

If you love crime fiction and a detective tale, Watching the Detectives is for you. Watching the Detectives is an anthology that brings together thirteen short stories, alongside interviews with each author. Each story transports the reader to a different time in...

Writing Displacement: Imperial Russia to 1970s Ireland

Writing Displacement: Imperial Russia to 1970s Ireland

Exile, war and social exclusion shape the lives of the author’s protagonists in The Bratinsky Affair, our Fiction Book of the Month, which takes the enduring experience of displacement as one of its major themes.

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...

A Rocket in the Marshes

A Rocket in the Marshes

In 1944, the Polish resistance managed to recover parts of Hitler’s secret V-2 rockets and passed vital intelligence to Britain, the operation becoming one of the most remarkable, yet overlooked, intelligence successes of the war.
Guy Walters

In a lonely corner of eastern Poland, not far from the River Bug, there is a stretch of countryside that looks entirely unremarkable. The villages are small and sleepy, the roads narrow and uneven, the fields flat and windswept. When I visited last November, a cold...