The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
It was 14 April 1912. Charles Joughin had finally fallen asleep after a hard day’s work in the ship’s kitchens. Suddenly, he was woken by a tremendous jolt. He felt the vessel shudder violently beneath him. Then, after a momentary pause, it continued moving forward....
I suppose you could say that I was a survivor of the Cold War. All my military service, from a rude awakening as an 18-year-old recruit for the Irish Guards at Caterham, until I finally stepped off in 2004, was spent in its constantly threatening and frequently...
The corpse was frozen and bleached by the sun. It lay face down in the snow, fully extended and pointing uphill. The upper body was welded to the scree with ice. The arms, still muscular, were outstretched above the head. Mountaineer George Mallory had last been...
It was three minutes past two on the morning of 28 April 1944. A flotilla of American warships was approaching Slapton Sands on the Devon coast in south-west England, a crucial practice exercise in advance of the D-Day landings. Exercise Tiger was a 300-vessel,...
Captain Luke Collingwood was used to grim voyages across the Atlantic, but this one had been worse than most. Dysentery, diarrhoea and smallpox had already claimed the lives of seven of the crew aboard the slave ship Zong. The slave cargo had suffered a far higher...
In the early evening of 4 July 1928, a fabulously wealthy businessman named Alfred Loewenstein boarded his private plane at Croydon Airport. It was a routine flight that would take him across the English and French coastlines before landing at Brussels, where...
The two heavily armed carriages rattled slowly into the central square of Tiflis (now known as Tbilisi), the state capital of Georgia. Seated resplendent in one of the carriages was the State Bank’s cashier. The other carriage was packed with police and soldiers....
For the occupants of Hitler’s private bunker the news could scarcely have been bleaker. The Soviet army was advancing so rapidly that it was now within a few hundred yards of the bunker’s perimeter fence. The nearby Schlesischer railway station had already been...
At exactly 2.30 p.m. on 11 July 1897, a gigantic silk balloon could be seen rising into the Arctic sky above Spitsbergen. Inside the basket were three hardy adventurers, all Swedish, who were taking part in an extraordinary voyage. Salomon Andrée was the instigator of...
What first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? I’m careful not to get too trapped in any one period! My particular interest is in individuals – often quite ordinary people - who find themselves cast into an extraordinary situation. I use their story to...
