The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Mark, the main protagonist of your popular detective series is Frank Merlin, a Scotland Yard detective in WW2 London. Can you tell us about him? Of course. Frank Merlin is a man in his early 40s as the series starts. He holds the rank of Detective Chief Inspector and...
It is an enduring trope of spy fiction that finds retired spies, their glories long behind them, approached and re-activated for one final mission. But sometimes, reality outdoes fiction and Helen Fry’s masterly new study of wartime resistance in Belgium relates how...
Much has changed for Nichols since his involvement with British Intelligence in the attempt to prevent the disaster at Pearl Harbour. Now recruited as an officer into Ian Fleming’s 30 Commando – an elite unit tasked with advancing ahead of the main forces to seize...
De Gaulle wrote of Churchill, and might well have written of himself, that he was an ‘artist of history.’ Both men were artists in how they wrote their history, but also lived their lives as thought they were constructing a work of art. They understood that every act...
Melanie Singh Hughes, what first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? The period from the end of WW1 to 1960 was one of tumultuous change. Old empires fell, new republics were formed, fascism and communism came into power, leading to genocide and huge...
Fitzpatrick, or “Fitz” as he was known, was commissioned into South Staffordshire Regt in 1914, serving with the 3rd Battalion during World War One. Transferred to the Indian Army’s 14th Punjab Regiment after the war, subsequent to its return from Palestine in 1923,...
The Second World War saw a desperate conflict between Allied and Axis scientists, who were locked in a deadly arms race to develop new technology - in what Winston Churchill called the Wizard War. To gain the upper hand in this secret war, the Royal Navy formed a...
Many if not all readers will at least know the basic facts about the so-called PQ17 disaster. PQ17 was the World War Two Arctic convoy whose merchant ships on 4 July 1942 were ordered to scatter while carrying arms and other aid to Russia because it was thought...
In SAS The Great Train Raid, Damien Lewis recounts the incredible actions of 2 SAS Regiment behind enemy lines in Italy during World War II. The centrepiece of the book is Operation Loco, an audacious raid on the Pisticci concentration camp to free its inmates, the...
