News

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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For those within range of Hitchin, I’m giving a talk in the library there at 11am on 9 June, part of an ongoing series of Saturday author talks by members of the Hertfordshire Society of Authors group. I’m talking about ‘The Pleasures and Perils of Writing Nautical Fiction’, so I’ll be touching on some of the ‘big guns’ like Forester and O’Brian, plus my own experiences in writing the Quinton Journals and my new Tudor series. Be warned, though, the room only holds 20-30 people, and it’s a case of first come, first served!

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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.