The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Many congratulations on the Those Must Be The Guards. The title is from the great Sir John Moore during the retreat to Corunna in 1809, who made the remark when noticing the Foot Guards maintaining their discipline when all about had lost theirs. Would a Guards...
I sometimes wonder why wonderful factual stories are dramatized and the historical information changed to create a better story. I understand it is dramatic licence and perhaps it makes for a more exciting story particularly for a movie or TV series like The Crown or...
John Sayles Interview I first watched Lone Star soon after it came out in 1996. This atmospheric film, centred on a small-town grappling with its past, is both a whodunnit and a social commentary. The town in question was in Texas and where three communities, White...
Colonialism: a Moral Reckoning contains a lot of history. If it does nothing else, I hope it will inform Britons, young and old, of the whole truth about our three-hundred-year career of imperial endeavour all over the world. For it tells not only of the tragic,...
I keep overhearing people debating between themselves the comparison of Robert Oppenheimer and Alan Turing, his British near contemporary - Turing was six years younger - who was the originator of modern computing. I feel as if this is also a debate that I ought to...
Iain, Checkpoint Charlie was your second history book, but your first on the 20th century. What is it about Checkpoint Charlie that fascinates us, nearly 35 years after the Wall came down? For those like me who grew up as teenagers in the 1980s, the Cold War was a...
Historical Heroes: Charles Dickens From pasting labels onto pots at the blacking factory, from taking supper with his family in the Marshalsea Prison, to the top of the Victorian literary tree, Charles Dickens’s story is a remarkable one. The blacking factory by...
