Tonight, Josephine: or, the Eagle has Landed in a Geography Lesson
‘So,’ said the Significant Other, the ‘LadyQJ’ of my Twitter feed, ‘how do you fancy going to see a five and a half hour French silent film made in 1927?’ Or words to that effect. Actually, it wasn’t five and a half hours: it was just two of the four acts, and the Byzantine intricacies […]
Dead Admirals Society’s Only Way is Essex
Attending a party in Chelmsford at the weekend had an unexpected bonus – my first visit to Chelmsford Cathedral, which revealed a couple of interesting naval memorials. Here’s the poignant epitaph for John Pocock Tindal, killed at the age of seventeen as signal midshipman aboard HMS Monarch, Vice-Admiral Onslow’s flagship. I’ve had an interest in the […]
Battlefield Bonkers Redux
Busy, busy, busy – into the home straight with writing my new non-fiction book for Seaforth Publishing, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy! So no time to write a new post this week…which gives me a perfect excuse to re-blog once again one of my most popular posts of all […]
But I Still Never Read Reviews, Dahling
A sort of semi-re-blog of an old post this week, one which first saw the light of day some three years ago. Looking back over it, I see that much of it still applies – I still look at my Amazon and Goodreads reviews only very rarely, unlike many fellow authors. This isn’t because I […]
An Investigation into Welsh involvement in the ‘Protestant’ side of the Thirty Years’ War
This week, I’m delighted to welcome a guest blogger to the site! Victoria Yee of the University of St Andrews has uncovered some fascinating material about the Welsh involvement in the Thirty Years War. This is a conflict that’s always fascinated me – indeed, I taught it for a time, to A-level students – so […]
‘We’ve Got Pepys Bang to Rights This Time,’ said Morse
Every now and again, a historian comes across something which is so far from left field that it’s actually from a completely different farm. That’s certainly the case with the discovery made a few years back by my friend and colleague, Richard Endsor, author of The Restoration Warship. As he’s doing a ‘star turn’ next weekend, dressing […]
