The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP on June 22nd 1922 was a profoundly shocking event in British and Irish history. There had not been an assassination in Britain of a sitting MP since the prime minister Spencer Perceval who was killed in 1812....
It seems so long ago; but once it was ‘all of our yesterdays’. My Burning Steel book is based on an oral history project interviewing the veterans of the 2nd Fife and Forfar Yeomanry (2nd F&FY) whilst working as the oral historian for the Imperial War Museum Sound...
Kissinger on Ukraine In his doctoral thesis, published in 1957 as A World Restored. Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822, Henry Kissinger put up a strong defence of the settlement reached at the Congress of Vienna. He argued that as there could...
The Journey Down In May 1982, my commanding officer unexpectedly asked me if I would like to go on an all expenses paid luxury cruise to the Falkland Islands, attached to the HQ element of 5th Infantry Brigade, aboard the grandest liner afloat: Queen Elizabeth II. The...
The Civil Wars, despite their importance in British history, tend to be little discussed - certainly in comparison to, say, the Tudor or Victorian eras. Why do you think that is - is the conflict viewed as too complicated, or stemming from obscure religious and...
In less assured hands, this could have been a turgid and thoroughly bewildering read. Thankfully, Don Hollway knows his subject inside out and neatly picks his way through the convoluted history of the late Roman Empire. As the title suggests, the focus is on events...
Bologna, Italy. November 1920. Ennio Gnudi was a humble railway worker. He was also a revolutionary communist. In the recent local elections, he had been elected to the council. Now, he had risen to be Mayor of the city. The Socialist Party’s radical left was about to...
Simon Medhurst has produced an extraordinary work in Titanic Day by Day: 366 Days with the Titanic. The great-grandson of Robert Hitchens, one of the six quartermasters of the Titanic, this is an ode to the lives lost on Titanic, so that they will never be forgotten....
Tony Blair and the Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, didn’t have a part a year ago when I was first writing about The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar. Now that the paperback is coming out, it seems a bit easier to write about the rather...
By the third year of the First World War, France was growing increasingly war weary. Over a million men had been killed, wounded or captured, with little to show for it. Russia had had a revolution and unrest was spreading through the French Army, fanned by turmoil at...
