India, 1937. Intrepid reporter Sir Percival Harris is hunting tigers with his friend, Professor Ernest Drabble. Harris soon bags a man-eater – but later finds himself caught up in a hunt of a different kind… Harris is due to interview the Maharaja of Bikaner, a friend to the Raj, for his London newspaper – and […]
Review: D-Day: The Last Heroes
Best-selling author AL Berridge reviews D-Day: The Last Heroes, shown on BBC One on Saturday, 8 June, 2019
Historia interviews: Clare Mulley
Historia talks to author Clare Mulley about her biography of Eglantyne Jebb, the woman who founded Save the Children
Writing popular history: Three lessons learned
“Read everything you can. Get to know the place you’re writing about. Know when to stop researching and start writing,” historian and author Eric Lee recommends. “Those are three of the lessons I have learned in the last quarter century as a writer of popular history.” My first book was an oral history of the […]
Review: They Shall Not Grow Old
At first it seems a strange title. “They shall grow not old” is from Laurence Binyon’s epitaph on The Fallen of World War I, but the emphasis in Peter Jackson’s masterly film is firmly on those who survived it: the men who enlisted and went out to France, but lived and came home to tell […]
The fight for our battlefields
“Have you forgotten yet?” (Aftermath, Siegfried Sassoon) Even before the guns fell silent across the Western Front a century ago, staff at the Michelin Touring Office in London were busy preparing guidebooks for motorists intending to go see the trenches for themselves (see images above and below). By the early 1920s battlefield tourism had become big […]
Sagas: they’re not all trouble at t’mill
Now I’ve loved history for as long as I can remember. In fact, I think I fell in love with the past and everyone living there when I was a child and saw Roger Moore gallop over the hill on that white charger in Ivanhoe on our 12-inch black and white TV screen. I love […]
Was America, not Wallis, the real reason Edward VIII abdicated?
What if Wallis Simpson wasn’t the real reason for Edward VIII’s abdication? Historian Ted Powell, Edward’s most recent biographer, writes about the playboy prince’s greatest love affair. Years before he met Wallis Simpson, King Edward VIII had fallen in love with America. As a young Prince of Wales he was captivated by the energy, confidence […]