The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
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...
At 3 a.m. on 6 May, 400 Allied guns ‘flamed into action’ on a 3,000-yard stretch of enemy front on both sides of the Medjez-Massicault-Tunis highway. ‘The gunners sweated as they thrust shells into the guns,’ wrote journalist John D’Arcy-Dawson. The noise...
It is hard not to feel for a petrified young man cowering in the dark, his underwater home groaning, cracking and springing leaks, as high explosives detonate yards away and there is just eighteen millimetres of steel holding back oblivion. Yes, even if he is a...
In the fields of the Peloponnese, the image of a lone survivor stood amid hundreds of dead reveals the brutality of ancient warfare and the military values that shaped Spartan life. As the light faded, his energy ebbing with it, the Spartan soldier Othryadas felt his...
23rd April 1813 Samuel Burrows was more excited than ever. Today was going to be his day. He had held the position of Chester’s, and therefore Cheshire’s, executioner for four years. However, until this day, only a select few knew of his official duties. For...
The two dominant strains in Richard’s character – an assumption of moral superiority combined with a painstaking and conventional concept of duty – do resolve the puzzling contradictions touching on his personal code of honour. He could denounce the Treaty of...
Is it fair to say that rivers are having a bit of a moment? Robert McFarlane’s invited readers to ponder their vital parts earlier this year with Is A River Alive?, while Fergal Sharkey cannot get a day off from leading the public campaign to clean up the UK’s rivers....
The concept of witches and witchcraft is ancient but this book concentrates largely on the explosion of mass witch trials which spanned the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. What were the reasons behind this? A conspiracy against women? A class war...
Brian Williams, what first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? My father was a history teacher and one of my abiding memories of childhood is of him spreading a map out on the dinner party and showing me where Waterloo was. I had come home from a visit...
The Three Magi (and the word itself!) are, in some traditions, believed to take their origin from which monotheistic religion, centred in Iran? Aeschylus’ Persians focuses on the disastrous naval defeat in 480 BC of which invading king? How exactly was Julius Caesar...
