The Dardanelles campaign in World War One was conceived as a ‘demonstration’ to relieve pressure on Russian troops, fighting in the Caucasus. It quickly developed into a means of opening the backdoor to the Central Powers and to supply the Russians through the...
Alan Bardos
Blackout, by Simon Scarrow
Night can hide all manner of monsters, some of them imagined and some of them real. In Blackout, Scarrow vividly brings to life Berlin in 1939. A vibrant cosmopolitan city, confident after Germany’s victory over Poland. However in the depth of a freezing winter, with...
Could the Dardanelles Straits Have Been Forced?
The Gallipoli campaign was originally conceived as a naval operation that could be carried out without the use of troops, to clear the costal fortifications barring the Dardanelles Straits. The plan was to gradually reduce the Turkish defences through a systematic...
Judas 62, by Charles Cumming
Judas 62 is largely set in 1993 and the present day so it might be pushing it to describe the book as historical fiction. However the roots of the book are in Russia’s biological warfare programme and its development since the end of the Second World War. Therefore I...
Conspiracy Theory: Who ordered the hit on Franz Ferdinand?
Who ordered the hit on Franz Ferdinand? There are two basic schools of thought about the origins of the plot to assassinate Franz Ferdinand. The first is that it was ordered by Colonel ‘Apis’ Dimitrijevic, the head of Serbian Intelligence, to stop Austro-Hungarian...
Before the Assassination: Archduke Ferdinand and the General
Bosnia and Herzegovina was a hotly disputed territory in 1914. It had been annexed by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1910 from the crumbling Ottoman Empire, but was also claimed by neighbouring Serbia and had a growing nationalist movement that wanted it to be part...
Alan Bardos
Alan Bardos, what prompted you to choose the period that you wrote your first book in? My first book The Assassins is set just before the First World War and is about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I chose that period because the events around the...
Alan Bardos
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Oskar Potiorek: The Most Infamous Man in History You’ve Never Heard Of,
When it was announced that Franz Ferdinand, the Heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, would visit Bosnia to attend manoeuvres in June 1914. It fell to General Oskar Potiorek, the military governor to organise the visit. This was a task Oskar Potiorek threw himself into...








