The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The Second World War was probably the greatest human catastrophe the world has ever seen. Historians have always struggled to find words that can convey even a glimpse of its total scale. We give endless statistics – more than 100 million soldiers mobilised, more than...
58 years ago JFK gave one of his best speeches. Speaking to huge crowds in West Berlin, he called on the free world to stand by Berliners divided by the Berlin Wall and threatened by their Communist neighbours. “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of...
Talks between the East India companies of Britain and France in 1754 promised to end a war between them in India and to transform the Franco-British relationship there. Responding to hints from London, the French proposed that the two companies ally to resist...
16 June is the anniversary of the Battle of Llandeilo Fawr in 1282. Piecing together the various accounts of this battle was quite fun: there is no lack of chronicle and administrative evidence, though as usual we are left with gaps and speculation. In April 1282...
Operation Pedestal, by Max Hastings. Review by Robert Lyman. Just when you thought that nothing more could ever be said of a subject, especially the supposedly over-written Second World War, along comes Max Hastings to put you right. Whatever else one might say about...
Radium in the Two World Wars In the late 19th century, German scientist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a previously unknown form of powerful radiation invisible to the human eye. This type of ray, which no one (including Röntgen) fully understood at the time, was so...
History and ancestry are sisters, or sisters-in-law. Historians and family historians sit next to each other in archives and public libraries. We take photographs of the same sources; we use the same online repositories and the same digital records. The universe of...
Georgina Weldon, a Victorian media sensation and campaigner against Britain’s archaic lunacy laws, liked to present herself as a restrained individual – someone thrust into the limelight due to circumstances beyond her control. And while such self-depictions were...
It was three minutes past two on the morning of 28 April 1944. A flotilla of American warships was approaching Slapton Sands on the Devon coast in south-west England, a crucial practice exercise in advance of the D-Day landings. Exercise Tiger was a 300-vessel,...
Summer Reads from Aspects of HistoryPaul BernardiTaking a well-earned break from the adventures of Beobrand in his much-loved Bernicia Chronicles series, Matthew Harffy moves forward the best part of one hundred and fifty years in this, his most recent and...
