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...
WW2
Chalke Daily: Storm Clouds and Scaramucci
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....
Episode 272
Stealing Hitler’s Rocket: The Incredible Mission to Smuggle a V-2 Rocket Out of Nazi-Occupied Europe to Britain, by Guy Walters
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
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 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...
Episode 271
Watching the Detectives: An Aspects of Crime Short Story Collection
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
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
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...










