Tidal Wave
At long last, I’m thrilled to be able to confirm that the first book in my new Tudor naval fiction trilogy will be published by Canelo this summer, currently as an e-book only. And the title is… Cue drumroll! Cue trumpets!! Cue my hometown male voice choir singing the Welsh national anthem!!! DESTINY’S TIDE Followers of […]
Review: The New Tudor and Stuart Seafarers Gallery at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
A disclaimer: this post has been written and posted rather more rapidly than usual, as it was only yesterday evening (19 September) that I went with the ‘LadyQJ’ of my Twitter feed (aka Wendy) to the launch event for the four new permanent galleries at the National Maritime Museum. So apologies if there are more […]
Sounding the Trumpet
I don’t often review books to which I’ve contributed, but this week, I’m going to make an exception and do a bit of trumpet blowing. During the last couple of weeks, the post has brought, inter alia, two complimentary copies of titles with which I was associated to varying degrees. The first is of the National […]
Soldier No More
I’ve been largely maintaining ‘radio silence’ on both the blogging and social media fronts for the last few weeks. This is due to a combination of factors: wanting to concentrate on finishing my new Tudor naval novel (hunky dory, since you ask); what Harold Macmillan might have termed ‘domestics, dear boy, domestics’ (although in his […]
Art
Time for some culture, although I can’t help thinking of a quote I first came across when teaching Mussolini’s Italy to schoolchildren some 30 years ago: ‘when I hear the word “culture”, I reach for my gun,’ said, yes, Mussolini’s Minister of Culture. Seriously, though, this is a particularly good time to be a lover […]
“One Year of the Sea! There’s Only One Year of the Sea!”
A version of this post would have been my first of the year, and would have been published some weeks ago, had not more pressing matters intervened. *** So it’s 2018, the Wales Year of the Sea. Or so the marketing gurus who came up with the concept tell us. Now, those of us who […]
Merry Christmas from the Restoration Navy!
A festive re-post from the very first Christmas of this blog, namely 2012… *** Henry Teonge, a Warwickshire clergyman, was fifty-five when he first went to sea as a naval chaplain, presumably forced into the job by the extent of his debts. In 1675 he joined the Fourth Rate Assistance, commanded by William Houlding, which […]
Dead Admirals Society Dons a Kilt
Apologies for the ‘radio silence’ last week. Regular followers of this blog will know that I sometimes take myself off to Landmark Trust cottages to brainstorm new novels or just to chill, and I spent last week at the tiny but perfectly formed Glenmalloch Lodge in Galloway. The upside of this was that even by […]
Dead Admirals Society Goes Danish
In last week’s two posts, I talked about the lovely Swedish city of Karlskrona, and the international conference on dockyards that I attended there. I bookended the trip with stays in Copenhagen, which I’d never visited before – a shocking admission, especially as my grandfather was there as long ago as 1965, arranging the deal […]
Don’t Mention the Cold War, Part 2
In this week’s first post, I gave my impressions of the dockyard town of Karlskrona and its terrific naval museum. Now on to the reason why I was there, an international conference on International Approaches to Naval Cities and Dockyards, held in the museum. From the moment it started, it was clear there was a […]
