The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Voices of History: Speeches that Changed the World As we have discovered in January 2020, words matter. They matter even more when spoken by powerful men and women. I write this in the context of the dying days of Donald Trump’s presidency, when his words have incited...
Iran is a country that is difficult to know, but easy to love. I have never been, despite being desperate to, for various reasons which are difficult to go into, but its history is the main draw for me. To visit the ruins of Persepolis is a dream for now. They were...
The Imperial War Museum (IWM) has been publishing their Wartime Classics, novels written by veterans of the Second World War and based on their experiences. The writers very much represent the citizen army, including the actor, Anthony Quayle, and Kathleen Hewitt, the...
When starting any historical fiction, I always wonder where it stacks up when compared with Sharpe, Patrick O’Brian, Hornblower and Flashman. It's fortunate, therefore, with Protector by Conn Iggulden, that one is in the hands of a master storyteller. Set in ancient...
Adrian Goldsworthy has been known until now as a bestselling historian of ancient Rome. Having written acclaimed biographies of Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar, it is refreshing to see him enter the world of ancient Greece, and take on the challenge of perhaps its...
For all his achievements Toussaint Louverture, hero of the Haitian Revolution, has had a limited number of books written about him, and so it is fortunate that a new publication has arrived with Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture. Sudhir...
“That speaks, don’t it? The past.” So says Ralph Fiennes’ character, the archaeologist Basil Brown, from the new Netflix movie, The Dig. The film dramatises excavations at Sutton Hoo during 1939, the results of which were so stunning that it re-defined our...
