The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Nature: Challenges & Changes I live in the polders of the Netherlands, within sight of what used to be called the Zuiderzee in the old atlases of my childhood. Outside my window where I write I look onto a large pool of water, formed by the confluence of the...
Napoleon's Birthday Napoleon was born on 15 August, 1769. Under the Gregorian calendar this date was a holiday celebrating the Ascension of the Virgin Mary. The French Revolutionaries introduced a new calendar on 5 October, 1793, backdated to 22 September, 1792, the...
In the years just before the First World War, a boy was growing up in Imperial India. He was obstinate and full of life. Still a toddler, he chatted to the servants in Hindustani. His father nicknamed him Kim, after the spy hero of Rudyard Kipling’s novel, who could...
I was not completely sure, when asked to review this book, whether 300 pages or so on Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen would be my sort of thing. I am interested in Georgian and Regency History but that interest tends more towards the political and the...
Adam Sisman, can you first tell us about the genesis of the book, The Secret Life of John le Carré? This shorter work serves as a coda to your full-length biography (although it can be read without being familiar with that work). When did you initially have the idea...
Birds of Prey, by Philip W. Blood The Bialowieźa forest, in Poland and Belarus, is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The forest is full of interesting plant life and a wide range of wildlife including wolves, wild boar, deer and European bison. No wonder then, that...
