Baroque and Roll
There’s an old adage to the effect that the best tourist experiences are obtained in places where tourists don’t go, and in recent weeks, I’ve been on a couple of trips which amply bear that out. Take, for example, this photo which I took in the Hall of Mirrors at the palace of Versailles at […]
The British Fleet at the Battle of Solebay, 28 May 1672
This week, this blog returns to one of its principal focuses, raising awareness of seventeenth century naval history and particularly that of the ‘Restoration age’. To that end, I’m delighted to welcome back, as a guest blogger, Frank Fox, the author of Great Ships: The Battlefleet of King Charles II and The Four Days Battle of 1666. For […]
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 […]
Act of Remembrance
This post is due to be published on 3 September 2018. (Apologies for the delay – there was a glitch in scheduling it.) On that date, I’ll actually be in France, and specifically at the Saint-Sever military cemetery, on the outskirts of Rouen. The reason for being there is that it’s the centenary of the death […]
The Agonising
As far as I’m aware, there’s no collective noun for a gathering of historical novelists; but if there was, it would probably be ‘an agonising’. This was demonstrated in spades last week, at the 2018 conference of the Historical Novel Society. What do historical novelists agonise about? Pretty much everything, really…but more of that anon. […]
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 […]
We Have Impact
Apologies again for the ongoing blogging hiatus in recent weeks – I’m still working hard on finishing off the first book in my new Tudor naval trilogy, and have also been working on the book on naval ideology, 1500-1815, that I’m co-editing with Alan James and Gijs Rommelse. I’ve also been working on the talk […]
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 […]
The Spirit of Not Dead Fred Revisited
For the next few weeks, I’m going to have my head down as I work on the first of my new Tudor naval novels, so I’m clearing the decks of as many other commitments and distractions as I can – and that includes blogging, for the time being at any rate. So I thought I’d […]
