The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
King Harald Sigurdsson of Norway, called Hardrada, the Hard Ruler, was a Viking hero straight out of fantasy: an outcast prince who won a fortune, romanced empresses, married a queen, and carved a kingdom for himself with his own blade. He launched the last great...
Abandoned on the banks of the Benin River in 1553, the first English merchants to travel to West Africa could only look back and reflect that, perhaps, their organisational strategy had not been very effective. Things had started well enough, with a painless departure...
I grew up with a passion for the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome, and fondly remember drawing my first Roman chariot with wax crayons on old computer print out paper aged about five! That love of all things ancient translated into something of an obsession as an...
Books Click on any of the books covers below to either buy or get more information on Amazon Articles Click on the links below to read the full article [dpdfg_filtergrid custom_query="advanced" use_taxonomy_terms="on" multiple_taxonomies="name_of_author"...
Friends! Brothers and sisters! Comrades! Fellow citizens! Your majesties and highnesses! My countrymen! My children! Fellow soldiers! Ladies and gentlemen! You can tell much by the opening of a speech. Elizabeth I begins hers majestically, ‘My loving people’. Mandela...
Dan Jones argues, if not proves, in his revelatory new book, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middles Ages, that the period made us. Good history doesn't necessarily need to be relevant, but more than most non-fiction titles this year Powers and Thrones will...
Long before John Wayne brought the world that walk; long before Clint Eastward flicked his poncho as the Man With No Name, long before the old West was immortalised on the big screen, it had already been framed in the minds of generations of men and women – in a...
Not many people remember Roscoe Conkling these days but from the late 1860s until his resignation from the Senate in 1881 he played a major role in US politics. At six feet three inches tall and of athletic build, Conkling was said to have cast his contemporaries into...
The Homicidal Earl: The Life of Lord Cardigan Of all the cock-ups that provide shade from the bright light of Britain’s military successes, the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Battle of Balaclava, fought in the Crimea on 25th October 1854, is one of the most...
Harry S. Truman’s decision to drop the bomb on Japan is inevitably controversial. The events of 6th August 1945, as ‘Little Boy’ was unleashed on Hiroshima, are brilliantly and tragically described by Saul David in Crucible of Hell. It is unpleasant to read of the...
