The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
In 1942 Hitler turned on Stalin and drove towards the Caucasus, aiming for the oil that would sustain the German advance. If he succeeded, the balance of the war could tilt. To hold them at bay, Stalin needed supplies quickly; fuel, vehicles, and equipment. Britain...
The pair of Anglican archbishops at Canterbury and York have been pillars of England’s ecclesiastical establishment for centuries, going back long before the Church of England itself. However, for a brief period between 787 and 803 England had a third archbishopric,...
The Romans too often get the good gigs, both on our screens and on the shelves, these days; the Greeks, not so much… That is the starting point of Adrian Goldsworthy’s journey east across the Mediterranean and his sweeping account of the two headline acts at the tip...
Caillan Davenport’s Behind Caesar’s Back is, for me, a rare book, in that it covers a subject I have not come across before and therefore opened up all sorts of new research ideas for me. The book investigates examples of gossip and rumour in Rome, from the end of the...
As the clock ticked down to D-Day the atmosphere in the central London office of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, reached feverish anticipation. Years of carefully calibrated deception, casting spells over the German generals defending the landing grounds...
What first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? I have always been interested in postwar history, particularly the Cold War-era in my own country, Sweden. It was a dangerous time, marked by pragmatic and secret cooperation with Nato to protect the...
When I first met historian Andrew Roberts, who wrote the foreword to my forthcoming book The Stay Behinds: Sweden’s Cold War Guardians, he asked: "How do you even research a stay-behind network?" Highly secret stay-behind groups were established across NATO-aligned...
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"...
There are novels that inform you, and there are novels that transport you. Anna M Holmes's Dance of the Earth does both with rare confidence, depositing the reader into the smoky gaslight of a Victorian music hall and then sweeping them forward, through the...
