The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The flogging of Queen Boudica and the rape of her daughters after the death of King Prasutagus of the Iceni remains an enigma. As a client kingdom of Rome, the Iceni royal family undoubtedly had Roman citizenship; whipping Boudica and raping her two daughters were...
On 20 November 1945 twenty-one defendants flanked by US guards were brought along the covered walkway from the prison cells, up the stairs, through a door behind the prisoners’ box and into the courtroom. This was the opening day of the Nuremberg Trials, where the...
This is the story of the Jewish children who fled to America and France on the eve of WW2, thus avoiding incarceration or death in the Holocaust. Based around oral and written testimonies, Who Will Rescue Us? traces the efforts of networks of relief workers and aid...
We don’t think of ‘the Harrimans’ as we think of, say, the Kennedys. But maybe we should. For serious students of Anglo-American relations there’s W. Averell Harriman, the diplomat (politician, financier; himself the son of a famous railroad baron) tasked with...
Changes in social attitudes happen unevenly across society. New ideas are adopted at different rates by different classes, age groups, and professions. So it is that an institution may persist in behaving in ways long considered antiquated by the society of which it...
First of all, Nicholas, congratulations on the publication of this endlessly fascinating and absorbing work. In the introduction, you describe the book as a fresh look at the subject rather than a rehash of your earlier work, Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons, some...
The setting of a story is vital for a historical novelist, perhaps even more than for those whose books are set in the present. This is for the blindingly obvious reason that a contemporary novel is set in a place or a milieu, whereas a historical novel has not only a...
It seems apt that the paperback edition of Andrew Lambert’s gripping analysis in No More Napoleons should be published as Britain’s contribution to the preservation of the security of the continent of Europe, and indeed the wider world, is under debate and our very...
Andrew Lambert, in No More Napoleons, you describe Britain’s strategy between 1815 and 1914 as “book-ended by existential total wars”. What prompted you to reconsider the 19th century not as an age of complacency, but instead a hundred years of vigilance? The tendency...
