The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
In an exploration of some of the most difficult times of his life, Peter Kasl details his trip as an 11-year-old with his family to flee the communist rule of Czechoslovakia. Escaping the Grip of Eastern European Communism allows a first-hand insight into the...
There is no shortage of books about the Romanovs, and fewer still that manage to resist being drawn too quickly toward their deaths. Mickey Mayhew’s Romanovs Under House Arrest is at its strongest when it slows the story down, devoting space to background, character,...
Michael Livingston’s new book pours fresh wine into a very old bottle: the subject of the Hundred Years War has been covered in detail by many historians, notably the multi-volume work by Jonathan Sumption. Livingston attempts to break new ground by extending the...
At a time when when India's independence narrative centres on either the much acclaimed (especially by PM Modi) courage and vision of Britain’s implacable enemy, Subhas Chandra Bose, or else Gandhi's non-violence and eloquence, writers and readers alike owe Gautam...
Some historians have labelled it a ‘genocide’, whereas other have suggested that what King William I did in the north of England, in the winter of 1069/70, was not out of character with the standards of the time. But, whilst we should always try to avoid projecting...
When on 19 August 14 CE, the Emperor Augustus died, by his side was his wife, Livia Drusilla. Livia was a paragon of Roman womanly virtues, who put hardly a foot wrong in fifty years of marriage to the most scrutinised man of his time, and yet, from at least the 2nd...
John Reith was a model of late-Victorian rectitude: devout, driven, serious to the point of severity. He was also, in many ways, an appalling man, self-absorbed, obsessed with titles and money, often petty and spiteful, even childish. He was deeply sentimental and a...
When he was killed at the battle of Bosworth in 1485, Richard III was venerated by some contemporaries and vilified by others. Even now, five hundred and forty years later, this monarch divides opinion more than Marmite. Not many medieval kings can boast legions of...
It is an enduring trope of spy fiction that finds retired spies, their glories long behind them, approached and re-activated for one final mission. But sometimes, reality outdoes fiction and Helen Fry’s masterly new study of wartime resistance in Belgium relates how...
