The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Traitor's Gate was your first foray into historical fiction, and you picked the eve of the Second World War and Nazi Germany. Why was that? After writing eight financial thrillers, I decided I wanted to do something new. A spy thriller intrigued me. I was...
The Hidden Village is set in a small town in Holland during WW2. The story focuses in on a group of likeable and courageous characters that are faced with a seemingly impossible task. The community has gathered their forces together to protect the people in danger....
Robert Child, how did you come to write the book? After all, it is an important story that needs to be told. I had written and produced a film for National Geographic called, The Wereth Eleven, about black soldiers in World War II which subsequently became a...
The immediate hook is the film of the Robert Harris novel, Munich: The Edge of War – and its obvious agenda to rescue Chamberlain for history. You will remember, especially if you have seen the film - which has been available on Netflix from last weekend - that...
British Heroes of the Holocaust What would I have done? What could I have done? The approach of Holocaust Memorial Day prompts us to remember the millions of victims, their suffering and the brutality and squalor amid which they were murdered. But it should also...
I clearly remember the time I was cycling through the leafy Veluwe woods, some 50 miles from Amsterdam, when I came across an extraordinary place I never knew existed in all the years I’d been taking family holidays in the area. I never realised it at the time, but...
The soldier that graces the cover of Immortal Valor, Sergeant Edward A Carter, epitomized the courageous warrior. His look of iron-willed determination was not forged during the battles of the Second World War but from an early age. Little did he know when he returned...
Benson Railton Metcalf Freeman looked every bit the archetypal English officer and gentleman: serious, smartly dressed, complete with the moustache that was so fashionable among RAF officers in the early days of the Second World War. Born in 1903, the son of a Royal...
Alex Gerlis, what prompted you to choose the period that you wrote your first book in? The Best of Our Spies was the first of my (nine) novels and I wrote it after I covered the 50th Anniversary of D-Day for the BBC in 1994. I spent some time out in Normandy and...
The Yasukuni Shrine is an island of calm in an otherwise bustling city. Mature pines and cypress trees surround it, screening it from Tokyo’s relentless traffic noise. Shady walkways, sacred ponds and dozens of cherry trees make it a haven for those who come here to...
