The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
What first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? Each book has had a different genesis, although they overlap. The one about the Battle of Monte Cassino, was prompted by a book I was helping on as a freelance editor, called War of Nerves (by Ben...
As the world around us reels from one crisis to another, it is worth pausing occasionally to remind ourselves that things could always be worse. Seventy-five years ago, the world was emerging from a catastrophe that makes our own troubles look trivial. We still live...
What first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? The Second World War was such a dramatic, traumatic event – but what interests me just as much is what happened next. How did we react to that massive trauma? How did it change society? How do we remember...
What first attracted you to the period you work in? I came to it after quite a long ramble through other periods, beginning with a childhood fascination with Ancient Rome (I loved the helmets), followed by Medieval Europe (knights in armour, castles, cathedrals), the...
June 2017 You are primarily a Russian historian and in 2016 published your book ‘The Romanovs’, the story of twenty tsars and tsarinas who were the most successful dynasty of modern times. Why did you write ‘Jerusalem: The Biography’ when all your other work is on...
How did your experience as a war correspondent influence your work as a historian? A lot. It’s been a real help. It has been a great way to see the scene on the ground. The armies moving and empires falling. The espionage that comes with a sort of breakup of power....
The end of World War I was greeted with relief throughout Europe, but in most countries this was accompanied by profound disillusionment with the political and social establishment which had brought it about. Such feelings led to revolution in Russia, Germany and...
As German tanks rolled over the border and occupied Poland on 1 September 1939, one of Britain’s most senior spymasters MI6 intelligence officer Thomas Joseph Kendrick arrived at the Tower of London. Within a special compound, away from the public eye, he opened a...
MI9 is best known for the daring exploits of escape and evasion by soldiers and airmen in the Second World War. New research uncovered in declassified files by Eye Spy associate editor and historian Dr Helen Fry now adds to the superb histories of MI9 written after...
“ALL political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure,” wrote Enoch Powell, the controversial but often perspicacious British politician, “because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” But the political lives of...
