News

I’m honoured and humbled to be able to announce that Kings of the Sea (details below) has been shortlisted for the prestigious Mountbatten Literary Award. This is the second time I’ve been shortlisted for this prize, the previous nomination being for Britannia’s Dragon.

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Talking of Kings of the Sea, I’ll be talking about it to the Royal Stuart Society on 8 November – details here. This will be the second time I’ve addressed the society, having previously done so in 1992 when I delivered the Betty Loosely Memorial Lecture.

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Also in November, I’m speaking at the conference ‘Commemorating the Welsh Experience of the Great War at Sea’ in Pembroke Dock, marking the centenary of the armistice and the work of the splendid ‘U-boat Project’, which has been making a huge contribution to our knowledge of Wales’s part in the war at sea. My final talk for the month is to the Hertfordshire Family History Society, where I’m returning to an old ‘stomping ground’, namely the Gowrie Conspiracy of 1600, the subject of my book Blood of Kings.

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The current situation with regard to the publication and availability of my fiction is a little complicated, so I’ve covered it in detail in a post on my blog. Please check that for further information!

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Those with an interest in the late seventeenth century Royal Navy might be interested to know that there’s a research group investigating the history of the Stuart royal yachts, and that it has a website, to which further information will eventually be added – www.syrg.org.uk. The group can be contacted via info@syrg.org.uk. I’m hoping to have a guest blog about the work of the group on this site in the near future. 

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My latest non-fiction book, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy, was published by Seaforth in August 2017. It does exactly what it says on the tin, i.e. examining the role of those two monarchs in the development of the navy, but it does a lot more as well, looking at the whole Stuart dynasty’s relationship with the sea – up to and including the Jacobite era, which has a surprising amount of relatively little known naval history. Kings of the Sea ties together a number of the themes that I’ve been investigating for over thirty years, as well as producing a large amount of new evidence which fundamentally revises perceptions of Charles II in particular.

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My other current non-fiction project is as the co-editor of a book on naval ideology, 1500-1815, along with Alan James and Gijs Rommelse. I’m contributing the chapter on the seventeenth century Royal Navy. I’m also gradually resuming work on my long-delayed book on the Stepney family, baronets of Llanelly House, and hope to complete this some time in 2019-20 – watch this space!

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Finally, a quick plug for the first book by my ‘significant other’ Wendy Berliner, the ‘LadyQJ’ of my Twitter feed! Titled Great Minds and How to Grow Them: High Performance Learning, this went immediately into the Amazon bestseller lists on the back of her Guardian article, which summarises the main arguments of the book.