The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Harry Sidebottom has written an invaluable work for scholars and storytellers alike. Those Who Are About To Die is a masterclass in how to both educate and entertain the reader simultaneously. Although the overall narrative deals with one day in the life of a Roman...
Whether you are interested in being introduced to British history, or you are familiar with it, Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee, will prove to be a find. Borne out of a successful podcast of the same name, Charlie Higson has written a book which entertains and educates in...
The Victorians were good at what we might call ‘spin’. En masse, they’ve been remembered as prudish, reserved, industrious, God-fearing. Their political leaders, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, seen as giants, fighting battles to modernise the state, to...
Annie Elliot – welcome to Aspects of History. What spurred you to write about Catherine Dickens? How did you first hear about her story? I read Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and thought writing from the perspective of a famous man’s wife was a great idea. Charles Dickens...
When writing my second Alexander Baxby mystery Naming the Dead, I tried to imagine what life was like for ordinary people in the early seventeenth century. A murder-solving physician such as Baxby would have witnessed much suffering and death. Average life expectancy...
There is something fitting in the idea of a photographer spy. Both espionage and photography require close attention to detail, an awareness of perspective, and an ability to manipulate reality. Sometimes, usefully, the activities overlap. Perhaps the most influential...
On 28 June 1914, a collection of Bosnian terrorists gathered in Sarajevo to target the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, Franz Ferdinand. It was a chaotic operation, with the first go not even attempted. A later grenade missed the Archduke’s motorcar and instead...
The 1920s and 30s were a golden age for American foreign correspondents in Europe. Until 1920, American newspapers had taken most of their international news from press agencies such as Associated Press. But during the 1920s, American papers started relying on their...
In George Orwell: Life and Legacy, Robert Colls provides a sharp and very lively examination of the man born Eric Arthur Blair, exploring how a "lower upper middle class" Etonian transformed into the world’s defining political writer of the twentieth century. Colls...
