The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
In his debut thriller, The Perfect Corpse, Giles Milton combines his mastery of strong narratives and his attention to historical detail to produce a page-turner as gripping as the best of Robert Harris. When a frozen corpse is found in Greenland ice — assumed to be...
Having recently appreciated Tucker-Jones’ book about Churchill, his book, Hitler's Winter, about the German perspective of The Battle of Bulge did not disappoint. Tucker-Jones has a great knack of being able to blend fact into a compelling narrative, such that this...
Ellie Midwood, many congratulations on the new novel. What inspired you to write about the Second World War? Thank you so much, and as for the inspiration, it was family history mostly. As a child, I preferred my grandfather’s war stories to normal kiddie fairy tales...
With so many books written on the Second World War you’d be hard pressed to find one that does not ask a question that has already been answered and debated at length, but Hitler’s American Gamble is one such book. Why on earth would Japan and Germany dare to declare...
Five Questions on War: 1. Does our biology explain why we have war? I say No: war is not engrained in us (but feel free to disagree with me and lots will). Biology might explain why we sometimes lash out violently when we are angry or afraid, but not why we have...
There have been many accounts of the disasters followed by the triumph of the Burma campaign in the Far East war, but few with the detail and perceptive analysis of A War of Empires. Robert Lyman is of course a noted authority on the history of the region, and his...
Lily Graham’s latest novel, The Last Restaurant in Paris, begins in 1980s France, where living memories of World War Two are slowly fading to just the older generations of the population. Yet when a young librarian, Sabine Dupris, inherits a restaurant from her...
Anthony Tucker-Jones, the Battle of the Bulge (or Ardennes Offensive) is one of the most famous clashes of the Second World War, and you’ve chosen to write about it from the German perspective. Why do you think we’ve not heard Germany’s side of the story? Well, I...
When asked by a young Reginald Bosanquet from ITN what he feared most, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously replied, ‘Events dear boy, events.’ We have all become aware in the last 18 months of the broad range of events which can cause political crises, as a...
One cannot but marvel at Adolf Hitler’s quite remarkable audacity when he launched four major operations in the winter of 1944. This was at a time when the Allies were relentlessly advancing on all fronts and his exhausted armies were in a complete state of disarray...
