The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
De Gaulle wrote of Churchill, and might well have written of himself, that he was an ‘artist of history.’ Both men were artists in how they wrote their history, but also lived their lives as thought they were constructing a work of art. They understood that every act...
I remember being taken on the Northern line as a child who loved talking kings and queens and reciting their dates and associated trivia ad nauseam (still my peak!). The murals that bring to life the platforms at Charing Cross were pointed out to me, the simple...
The historical context of Delhi – City of Spies is crucial to my novel because it is the true story of an unsolved murder that took place in New Delhi in 1954 at the height of the Cold War. Although my book is based on a family archive and is, therefore, subjective...
In Battle of the Arctic, a magisterial and exhaustive chronicle, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore lays out the perils faced by Allied merchant and naval forces ferrying supplies to Stalin’s Soviet Union with a very well-judged mixture of original testimony – much of it...
On the afternoon of 30 June 2007, outside Terminal One at Glasgow Airport, a baggage handler was on a fly cigarette break when a Jeep Cherokee sped towards the main entrance and smashed into the security bollards. It looked like some sort of crazy ram-raid. After the...
Peter Kasl, your memoir begins through the eyes of your eleven-year-old self. Was it revisiting childhood memories and those perception of the events surrounding your escape from Czechoslovakia that drove the writing of this book? I remember all my experiences in that...
My short story City of the Damned traces the years of Hugh O’Neill's life from his defeat at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601 to his exile in Rome surrounded by spies, plots, and the threat of poison. This is the man who came closest to ending English rule in Ireland and...
Mickey Mayhew, your new book covers the final days of the Romanovs, focusing on their imprisonment in the Alexander Palace. What drove you to dig into these few months specifically? I have been fascinated by the Romanovs since picking up a biography on Rasputin in...
In this compelling narrative study of the rise and fall of Sparta, Birmingham University professor, Andrew Bayliss, seeks to strip away the myth of the Spartans, peer behind the lens of unreliable ancient historians, and get to the heart of what this extraordinary...
How did the Industrial Revolution come about? And why did it start in Britain? Professor Edmond Smith examines these fundamental questions in compelling fashion, from the founding of the Royal Society in 1660 to the onset of imperial glory at the turn of the 19th...
