The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
In his fascinating book Inheritance, Leo Hollis shines a light on a unique period in English history when, as he puts it, London went from a dilapidated backwater to the largest city in the world, all within the span of a single lifetime. The life in question was that...
London: Origins of a Modern City If there ever was a revolution in 17th century Britain, it did not occur on the battlefields of the 1640s between the forces of the Royalists and the Parliamentarians. It was a slower, more evolutionary transformation that spanned a...
It is sometimes assumed in the collective memory that football in England ceased to be played with the suspension of the leagues at the end of the 1914/15 season but as Alexander Jackson points out in his highly readable account of the game during the First World War...
Charles Cornwallis, Lord Cornwallis, is remembered as one of the salient military leaders of the American Revolution, blamed for the British defeat at Yorktown that marked the beginning of the end of the Revolution. Yet as Richard Middleton´s masterful new biography...
As a 6-year-old at the time, my memory of the Falklands War is vague and seen through the prism of national newspaper headlines and the 6 o’clock news. With my father in the army, I was all for The Sun’s portrayal of the British Army as supermen, and it seemed a fait...
Capital of Spies For anyone who lived in West Berlin during the sixties, seventies or eighties, the very mention of the great city’s name on a news bulletin brought a frisson of excitement with memories of Russian checkpoints, the Wall and constant flow of spy stories...
1939-1945 As I Remember A fascinating account of life within a Yeomanry regiment during the Second World War, this book merits a place on the bookshelf of any serious student of Yeomanry units at war. Leslie Wheeler became the Quartermaster and senior non-commissioned...
Richard Middleton, Charles, 1st Marquis Cornwallis is probably most well-known for his disastrous military leadership during the American War of Independence. Was he really a terrible commander? Cornwallis’s career as a field commander certainly began badly when he...
Alexander Jackson, your book deals with Association Football during the First World War. Just how popular was the game in Britain by the time the war started in 1914? By 1913 much of the modern game had emerged. On the one hand, there was a grassroots game, ranging...
Roman Britain's Lost Ninth Legion The fate of the 5,500 men of legio IX Hispana is one of the greatest historical mysteries of all time. Uniquely among the Roman legions, of which there were over time more than 60 (and at any one time in the Empire a maximum of 33),...
