The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
In June 1772, Russian forces bombarded, stormed and captured Beirut, a fortress on the coast of Ottoman Syria. The Russians were backing their ally, a ruthless Arab despot. When they returned the next year, they occupied Beirut for almost six months. Then as now, they...
It was the 1st Duke of Marlborough (1715) who once said: ‘No war can be conducted successfully without early and good intelligence.’ That was also the belief of Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair (the head of MI6) in 1938 as Britain faced the escalating threat of war from Nazi...
In autumn 1940 British intelligence, MI9, opened a secret interrogation centre on behalf of in the heart of the millionaire enclave of London’s Kensington Palace Gardens. Taking over Nos. 6-7 and 8 & 8a, its commanding officer Colonel Alexander Scotland ensured...
What first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? I have always been interested in history – inspired from a charismatic and quirky history teacher at school. As a teenager I loved to read historical fiction from the Tudor period. I was obsessed with...
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Russia and Britain are old foes, and War and Peace is a complete fictional world with its own extraordinarily lifelike exuberance but, as with most Russian novels, it is also about Russia’s vision of itself — its quest for its rightful place in civilisation and its...
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‘The Red Army could have defeated Nazi Germany without Allied help,’ records The Times of London, ‘according to two thirds of Russians, who are adopting an increasingly positive view of Joseph Stalin’s wartime leadership despite the enormous casualties suffered under...
