The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The Stuart era is currently undergoing something of a rebirth in historical fiction, with authors turning their keystrokes to the long-reviled and much-decried Stuarts. Andrew Taylor has been amongst the vanguard in reassessing and promoting this era as the...
The Battle of New Orleans (in reality, a series of engagements leading to the one-sided slaughter of 8 January 1815) was one of the greatest defeats suffered by the British Army in the nineteenth century until Isandlwana in 1879, when a comparable number of British...
As the coronation of Charles III approaches, Action This Day ploughs us back into a time of risk, uncertainty and unthinkable steaks. The era of the Second World War might’ve been rife with struggle, but there was more than just that; individual stories, people,...
Elizabethan Secret Agents, Fédon's Rebellion and Operation Condor with Timothy Ashby | RSS.com
Desperate Valour is the sequel to Timothy Ashby’s 5* bestseller Ranger, though it works perfectly well as a ‘stand alone’. It follows the adventure of Major Alexander Charteris (known as ‘Chart’), a mixed-race, English-educated son of an aristocrat and a West Indian...
In 1588 a galleon, the San Juan, mysteriously sank in Tobermory, Isle of Mull. Timothy Ashby, historian and author of a new book on Elizabethan espionage traces the history of that Spanish ship. For centuries the sunken Spanish Armada ship known as the ‘Tobermory...
William Ashby, ambassador and spy, is not a well-known historical figure. Indeed, so successful a secret agent was he that few today will have heard of him. To me, he has always been little more than a name, mentioned in biographies of King James (when Ashby, seeking...
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...
If you are looking for a page-turning historical novel that explores race and class in the late 18th century, as well as being filled with action and engaging characters, then read Ranger. Laced with intrigue, war and the complexity of racial prejudice within English...
Timothy Ashby, what first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? I have been fascinated by the Elizabethan era since reading that a distant relative was a top “intelligencer” and English ambassador to Scotland. I lived on the island of Grenada as a young...
