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History
Six of the Best: Books on Napoleon
If you want to know the truth then you must read this selection of titles on Boney.
Six of the Best: Books on Napoleon With Ridley Scott’s new movie, Napoleon, out soon and starring Joaquin Phoenix as Bonaparte and Vanessa Kirby as Josephine, much discussion has been prompted over its historical accuracy. If your interest is peaked then you must...
Books of 2023 From Aspects of History
Our authors and contributors recommend books they've enjoyed this year
Books of 2023 from Aspects of HistoryAlan Bardos Author of The Dardanelles ConspiracyMy book of the year is SAS Forged in Hell. The next instalment of Damien Lewis’ WW II odyssey with the men of 1 SAS, as they become the ‘tip of the spear’ in the invasion of Sicily...
Elizabeth and Philip, by Tessa Dunlop
This splendid book provides a fresh perspective on a well-known story.
As Tessa Dunlop says in her introduction, when she began to write Elizabeth and Philip, she did not expect the story to end so definitively with Queen Elizabeth’s death, despite her great age. The monarch had lost her husband of seventy-three years in 2021; he had...
A Family History of the World
Our editor met Simon Sebag Montefiore in 2022 to talk historical events and families, interspersed with current affairs such as Ukraine and Iran.
On the day I meet with Simon Sebag Montefiore to discuss his new book, The World: A Family History, the Russians have plundered the body of Prince Grigory Potemkin who was the subject of Sebag’s breakthrough book in 2001. Catherine the Great & Potemkin (Aspects of...
Cleopatra Selene: Egyptian Princess, Roman Prisoner, African Queen
The author of a new biography looks closely at the woman who continued the Ptolemaic dynasty beyond Egypt’s borders.
Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of Cleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt, and Marcus Antonius (known as Mark Antony), Roman consul and triumvir, was born in 40 BCE. This made her around ten years old when the civil war between her father and his fellow triumvir Gaius Julius...
The World: A Family History, by Simon Sebag Montefiore
An expansive, enlightening, and entertaining history of some of humanity’s most interesting characters.
An expansive, enlightening, and entertaining history of some of humanity’s most interesting characters. The first thing worth mentioning about Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s The World is that it wholly delivers on the promise of its title and its synopsis. If you are by...
Episode 113
Kings & Queens with Iain Dale | RSS.com
Bonus Podcast 1
Bonus Episode: Top 10 Families of History | RSS.com
The Rise and Fall of Mercia
Mercia was the height of stability, and strength, in the hundred years before the reign of Alfred the Great, but why did that strength fade?
Throughout the 700s, the ancient Saxon kingdom of Mercia was the powerhouse in Saxon England. The key to its success, as in the Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria and Wessex both before and after it, was the longevity of its kings. First, King Æthelbald, and then his...