The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Don Hollway, Harald plays an all too brief part in the history of these isles but there is so much more to the man. What led you to want to write about him? I first read Hardrada’s story as a boy and thought, “Wow, what a life that guy led!” I always wanted to tell...
How did a failed rebel against Ancient Rome become a figure of hope for a dejected people in modern times? And how did that unlikely hero become an intrinsic part of the case for the foundation of an entire country? The man at the centre of the story is known as Bar...
The preamble to the American Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson and revised by Congress, declares that all men have certain 'unalienable Rights', including 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness'. This was the culmination of a century of...
The First Kingdom – How the Sutton Hoo dig rescued the 'Dark Ages' Before the 1920s, archaeologists excavating the deep past had barely tapped into the potential for their trowels and picks to illuminate the 'Dark Ages' – that obscure period in British history between...
Merchants, in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are ubiquitous. One finds them represented on the stage, for example, in the works of Shakespeare and Jonson (‘let’s see him creep!’). The word itself conjures up a host of senses: the jingling...
What do you do if you’re an uneducated 20-year-old Victorian woman, married to an unimpressive man, with two children but still living with your Mum, the threat of the workhouse ever looming? This was the life of Emily Soldene when she read a glowing review of the...
Edmond Smith, what inspired you to write about these early entrepreneurs, the subject of your new book, Merchants? My PhD set out to explore how individual investors shaped the infamous East India Company, but the more I dug into this, the more links I discovered with...
The Imperial War Museum has just opened an exhibition by Wim Wenders, Photographing Ground Zero, to commemorate the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. For such a huge event, 20 years ago, the free-to-enter display of his work is measured, thought-provoking, and highly...
In the course of reading for review (and pleasure) Saul David’s latest and most excellent book, SBS: Silent Warriors, the first authorised account of the famous amphibious commando unit, I realised that, although I was born three years after the end of the events...
There have been so many biographies of Ian Fleming that surely there cannot be room for yet another? But Oliver Buckton has demonstrated that there is. Through his extensive research he has succeeded admirably in providing an extraordinary major new study of Fleming...
