The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Jean Briggs, welcome to Aspects of History! What prompted you to choose the period that you wrote your first book in? It was my interest in Charles Dickens that decided the period. I was reading his journalism and found that he had written about the Victorian police...
As soon as I picked up this book I knew it was a brilliant idea, and wondered why no-one had thought to do it before. The answer lies in the book itself, which is that the amount of research taken is enormous. Writing as an amateur, and not a historian, it is a...
England’s First King In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (specifically the Winchester Manuscript, also known as version [A]), the entry for the year 925 [924] states: “Here, King Edward [The Elder] passed away, and Æthelstan, his son, succeeded to the kingdom.” Taken at face...
SAS South Georgia Boating Club began life as a war diary kept by me in a notebook during the Falklands War in 1982. Many years later, and with the encouragement of my grown-up son, this became the nucleus of an idea to write my life story with the war diary sandwiched...
Congrats on your latest title, At the Gates of Rome. In the introduction to your book, you mention Edward Gibbon’s seminal Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire. How influential is Gibbon, both historically and to your own work, and do we need to move on from his...
Miranda Malins, what led you to the 17th century and the English Civil Wars that you wrote your first book in? A school debate about the execution of Charles I and a trip to Cromwell’s House in Ely first sparked my passion for this brilliant period. It is the most...
HistFest is a festival, running for only two years seeking to offer history for all audiences, and who could complain about such an aspiration? Partnered and hosted by the British Library, it’s easy to get to, and the 2022 line up featured many fantastic subjects, not...
The world watched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with horror and disbelief. The siege of Mariupol, the shelling of Kharkiv, alleged war crimes in Bucha. A willingness to lay waste cities, destroy infrastructure and murder civilians. All presided over by a leader in...
It took little more than a single generation for the centuries-old Roman Empire to fall. In those critical decades, while Christians and pagans, legions and barbarians, generals and politicians squabbled over dwindling scraps of power, two men – former comrades on the...
Margaret Willes, what inspired you to write about this subject, a book not about the cathedral, but about its surrounding area? My first memory of St Paul's Churchyard was emerging from the Underground into an area of devastation. It was probably in 1953, when my...
