The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Alan, your novel Rising Tide is set during World War II, prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, whereas your earlier series focused on World War I. What inspired you to explore a new conflict in your writing? In my previous First World War series I looked at how waging...
I’m frequently asked how much of my novel Sawadika American Girl is drawn from real life. A work of historical fiction, it is the story of a 17-year-old American woman coming-of-age in 1968 Thailand when the country served as a major US military outpost for America’s...
Summer Reads from Aspects of HistoryZeb Baker-Smith Editor at Aspects of HistoryPaul Knox’s Lost London offers a captivating itinerary of 25 buildings which are no longer, but whose lifespan shaped the capital’s architectural story, revealing how the perennial cycle...
Aethelred II of England, known to history as Aethelred the Unready, is considered to be one of our most hopeless monarchs. For a thousand years he has had a reputation for failure that is perhaps only outdone by Bad King John. Yet Aethelred was the longest reigning...
If you love crime fiction and a detective tale, Watching the Detectives is for you. Watching the Detectives is an anthology that brings together thirteen short stories, alongside interviews with each author. Each story transports the reader to a different time in...
Welcome back to Aspects of History, Jim. The Bratinsky Affair, our Fiction Book of the Month, combines murder mystery, espionage thriller, and historical fiction. What first inspired the book, and how did the story evolve from that earliest conception? Serendipity...
A recent article in The Guardian featured a new book of short stories by Colm Tóibín: “Tóibín’s short stories, particularly in his 2026 collection The News from Dublin, are fundamentally concerned with exploring the internal and external lives of characters living at...
Operation Berlin is the first of a new historical mystery series set in 1930s Europe which is to be known as The Foreign Correspondent series. Its author is Michael Ridpath, an extremely accomplished one, several of whose previous books I have read and enjoyed. I...
As I understand it, Blood Feud is the first book in your second trilogy (Rebellion). Set the scene for us. That’s right. We begin in a small village (Acum or Acomb as it is today) in the far north of England, situated close to Hadrian’s Wall and the River Tyne. The...
