The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Congratulations to Julian Jackson, the author of France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Petain, on winning the 2023 Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize. Our editor and part of our board attended an elegant and enjoyable event at the Travellers Club in Pall Mall. The champagne...
Deborah, congratulations on The Shadow Network. What inspired you to write it? The idea of manipulating the public through ‘fake news’ has many resonances for today, and this is what led me to be interested in the subject for a novel. How the media is controlled, and...
The Reel War: Military History & Film War Films provide drama, tension and horror in the right quantities to keep audiences in their seats. Having been in both the military and the film industry I’ve seen first-hand the pressure on a film’s historical accuracy of...
From Taranto to Pearl Harbor I’ve always been captivated by the daring and skill of the Fleet Air Arm's attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto in 1940 and the much larger airstrike on Pearl Harbour, carried out a year later by the Japanese Navy. They were pioneering...
Well, I don’t know about you, but I thought Jack Miller and Sophia von Naundorf had made it through to peacetime at the end of Agent in Peril. Not a bit of it – they still have their most exciting and dangerous mission before them, and what could be their most...
For military historians the top of the academic greasy pole is the Chichele Chair of The History of War at Oxford, and so one would expect any work emanating from that source to be the definitive work of its subject. Iron and Blood by Professor Peter H. Wilson is...
Culture & Democracy in West Germany In the dictatorship of the Third Reich, the absence of democracy meant the absence of individual liberties. For visual artists, musicians, and men and women of letters, film and the stage, next to governmental content criticism...
SAS Brothers in Arms is a fascinating character study of the men who founded the SAS and the desert war they fought during WW II. Lewis follows the development of the SAS from a parachute unit to its adoption of vehicles to take them to their targets. Developing...
How Decisive Was the Attack on Pearl Harbor? The Japanese surprise attack on Hawaii in 1941 achieved its initial goal of knocking out the US Pacific Fleet, but how decisive was it? Could the Pacific War have been ended before it even started? Japan’s objective behind...
Alan, many congrats on embarking on your new novel, Rising Tide. We’re now in WW2, and Pearl Harbor after your earlier WW1 adventures. Why did you want to shift conflict? Thanks very much. In my previous First World War series I looked at how waging a quick decisive...
