The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
John Pitts – welcome to Aspects of History. Your book, Carausius and Allectus, is set amid uprisings in late Roman Britain. Talk us through how the idea for a novel came about? During the first Covid lockdown in 2020 I discovered a family history chart belonging to my...
Why did you choose the SOE as a subject for a novel?The SOE occupies a special niche in Second World history. How could it not? The brilliance of its founders who conceived and wrestled into it into being, its personnel, the agents and exploits, both successful and...
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"It is with heavy heart that I tell you we have to cease fighting. Last night, I asked our adversary whether he was prepared, between soldiers, after the struggle and in honour, to seek a way to end hostilities." These were the words of France’s new prime minister,...
'Pug' Ismay was the personification of discretion and diplomacy. His book, The Memoirs of Lord Ismay, is testimony to this: no revelations are included, no confidences betrayed, no secrets exposed. There is hardly an unkind word about any of the people he met or...
Much as the vast majority of medieval royal marriages, Margaret of Anjou's marriage was one of pure political necessity over which she had no influence. She would in theory live her life at the mercy of the policies of her husband, at the often cruel demands of war...
Some historians have labelled it a ‘genocide’, whereas other have suggested that what King William I did in the north of England, in the winter of 1069/70, was not out of character with the standards of the time. But, whilst we should always try to avoid projecting...
So, Paul, The Reckoning is the third and final book in the Rebellion trilogy. Bring us up to date with where Thegn Oslac of Acum is now. Yes, it seems a long time since I started the first book, but we’re finally into the home straight now. After the failure of the...
When on 19 August 14 CE, the Emperor Augustus died, by his side was his wife, Livia Drusilla. Livia was a paragon of Roman womanly virtues, who put hardly a foot wrong in fifty years of marriage to the most scrutinised man of his time, and yet, from at least the 2nd...
The historical context of Delhi – City of Spies is crucial to my novel because it is the true story of an unsolved murder that took place in New Delhi in 1954 at the height of the Cold War. Although my book is based on a family archive and is, therefore, subjective...
