The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The Springfield Witch-Hunt Like most books, The Ruin of All Witches took years to research and write, but all along I’d thought of it as a real-life fairy tale. At the time I began working on it, I was reading Philip Pullman’s masterly retelling of Grimms’ tales to my...
You cannot seek to bribe nor twist - Thank God - the British journalist. But seeing what the man will do Unbribed, there’s no occasion to. That was Hilaire Belloc’s take on the British press and – although she has not quoted it – that appears to sum up the...
Ian Gardner, congratulations on Sign Here for Sacrifice. What sort of unit was the 506th and what was their history? The 506th Airborne Infantry Regiment was a Regular Army organisation of which the Third Battalion (subject of this latest work) was born in early 67 to...
Charles Dickens and Charity: The most perplexing female I have ever encountered… In the research for my novels featuring Dickens as an amateur detective, I frequently turn to the Pilgrim Edition of the letters. The footnotes provide all kinds of fascinating detail for...
William Ashby, ambassador and spy, is not a well-known historical figure. Indeed, so successful a secret agent was he that few today will have heard of him. To me, he has always been little more than a name, mentioned in biographies of King James (when Ashby, seeking...
In 1066 Harold Godwinsson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, was killed at the battle of Hastings. Yet England was not conquered in a single day. The victor, Duke William of Normandy, had to fight tooth and nail for several years to hold onto his conquest. To...
David O. Stewart revisits Washington’s political career with two objectives. Half his book examines his subject’s personal and political development before 1775 to show how Washington developed impressive political skills and a clear political agenda. Although most of...
The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Do languages constitute nations, or do nation-states constitute languages? That is one of the recurring questions in modern history, and it is not simply an intellectual brain-teaser. Languages, and the national passions they can stir,...
Cities come and go, some destroyed by humanity, others by nature, others simply abandoned. Several decades ago, I happened upon an example of the last kind, in India. The redstone city was deserted, its wide empty paved streets extending into the distance towards the...
Tom Petch, congratulations on the new book. Why write about the SAS? The story of the origins of the SAS in the Second World War interested me because I knew there was more to the story than David Stirling’s account of his pitch to GHQ Cairo in 1941. I’d been a junior...
