The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Just over a decade ago, I started working on a two-volume series on the North American Aviation Mustang, chiefly aimed at modellers and warbird enthusiasts. The two volumes were respectively to cover the Allison-engined and Packard Merlin-engined versions of the...
Cromwell's Protectorate with Paul Lay | RSS.com
Paul Lay, your book Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell's Protectorate. This has been an in vogue subject of the last few years, really, this period of the 17th century, the Civil Wars and then the Interregnum. Oliver Cromwell played rather a sort of...
The Bitter Legacy of Partition In 2008 I was commanding British and allied troops in South-East Iraq. We had been withdrawn from Basrah city the previous summer and were now based at the airport in insufficient numbers to do much more than protect ourselves. None of...
Royal yachts - like the word yacht in English - haven’t been with us forever. They both began during the English Civil War, and it was only when Charles II took to the sea himself - and loved it - that the whole business of royal yachts began. The first one was...
Do you think Bill Slim’s ideas surrounding courage and morale can be applied to modern-day warfare? Absolutely. They’re timeless. All soldiers need to be motivated to fight. Napoleon described ‘the moral to the physical as three is to one’. To be motivated, soldiers...
The second volume of David Carpenter’s magisterial two-part biography of King Henry III covers the latter fourteen years of his reign, 1258-1272. It opens with the revolutionary events of 1258, in fact more far-reaching than 1215’s Magna Carta, when a group of armed...
The Buckingham History Festival, which takes place in the celebrated market town over the weekend of 15-17 September, is one that subscribers to Aspects of History will relish. There’s a particular emphasis this year on the Early Modern period – which is no surprise...
Leading historian of the French Revolution John Hardman provides a compelling new biography of Antoine Barnave, the influential statesman who advocated for a constitutional monarchy in early revolutionary France. Frequently described as being politically two-faced,...
Michael Smith, what first attracted you to the period you work in? First and foremost, I’m an aviation geek. Much as I like contemporary aircraft, I’m fascinated by historic aviation. In the context of world history, aviation is a modern-day technology, yet it’s been...
