The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Our Smolensk excursion was quite an event for me – being my first trip out of Moscow… We were first going down there by car, but then plans were changed and a private train was provided – for us, two Foreign Office press officials and a bevy of N.K.V.D. The train was...
When Elizabeth I lay dying in March 1603, England held its breath. Later generations would remember the Tudor succession as smooth, almost serene. But that is hindsight. At the time, many feared – and some expected – civil war. Elizabeth had refused to name her...
Your book After Elizabeth opens at Whitehall during the last Christmas of Elizabeth I’s reign. From a political perspective, what sort of environment was Sir John Harington walking into? He walked into a court glittering on the brink of extinction. There were dances,...
John Pitts – welcome to Aspects of History. Your book, Carausius and Allectus, is set amid uprisings in late Roman Britain. Talk us through how the idea for a novel came about? During the first Covid lockdown in 2020 I discovered a family history chart belonging to my...
While it is often thought that British military engagement in northwestern Europe ended with Waterloo in 1815 and resumed, a century later, with the First World War in 1914 – with a few periods of invasion anxiety surfacing around the middle of the 19th century –the...
Geoffrey – welcome to Aspects of History. Talk us through the story that led to you compiling and editing this collection of Kathleen Harriman’s letters together. As the tragedy of the 9/11 terror attacks unfolded, I was in the Library of Congress, combing through the...
One of our most cherished and favourite authors, Gordon Corrigan, passed in the last week. Gordon was a soldier, broadcaster, historian and friend. He wrote, on a variety of periods and subjects, with both scholarship and style. He was one of our most popular guests...
A great deal of garbage has been written regarding 1950s American murderer and ‘body snatcher’/graverobber Ed Gein. Gein (born in 1906) grew up in Plainfield in Wisconsin under the thumb of an - allegedly - religious zealot of a mother; she was his entire world and...
