Historians and writers need to be open to chance discoveries, says Eric Lee. Serendipity can be a researcher’s secret weapon, as he found while working on his latest book. When doing research for a work of history or a historical novel, we know (or should know) how to locate and use primary sources, where to […]
The August Uprising, 1924 by Eric Lee
For three years following the Russian Revolution, the small South Caucasian country of Georgia was a democracy. But Stalin later ordered the Red Army to invade and to bring the country back under Russian rule. Communist attacks on political opponents, trade unions, cooperatives, and even the church sparked resistance, and an armed uprising broke out […]
Britain’s Plot to Kill Hitler: The True Story of Operation Foxley and SOE by Eric Lee
Operation Foxley was the name of the secret plan supported by Winston Churchill to assassinate Hitler in 1944–45. More than 75 years after its conception, the assassination plan remains shrouded in mystery. Eric Lee’s new book is the product of painstaking research and sheds more light on this plan. This book asks what would have […]
At the National Archives in Kew, the past comes alive
The historian Eric Lee, author of Night of the Bayonets: The Texel Uprising and Hitler’s Revenge, April – May 1945, looks back at – and forward to – the pleasures of research at the National Archives. One of the great advantages of writing history in the UK is being able to use the National Archives […]
Night of the Bayonets by Eric Lee
In the final days of World War II in Europe, Georgians serving in the Wehrmacht on Texel island off the Dutch coast rose up and slaughtered their German masters. Hitler ordered the island to be retaken and fighting continued for weeks, well after the war’s end. The uprising had it origins in the bloody history […]
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 […]
The Georgian Experiment
Author Eric Lee on his thirty year quest to publish a book about Georgia’s forgotten revolution. I was born in America at the height of the Cold War, during the McCarthy era, when the word “socialist” was a term of derision. But I somehow managed to find myself on the Left (the Vietnam war may […]
The Experiment by Eric Lee
For many the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a symbol of hope. In the eyes of its critics, however, Soviet authoritarianism and the horrors of the gulags have led to the revolution becoming synonymous with oppression, threatening to forever taint the very idea of socialism. The experience of Georgia, which declared its independence from Russia […]