News

I’m delighted to honoured to be able to announce that Kings of the Sea (details below) has won the Society for Nautical Research’s Anderson Prize, hard on the heels of it obtaining a Certificate of Merit for the equally prestigious Mountbatten Literary Award. Both prizes are awarded for the best maritime history book published in 2017. Further details can be found on my blog.

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I’ve got a really exciting list of speaking engagements coming up in 2019. I can’t reveal the details of all of them as yet, but dates that I can confirm early in the year are the maritime history seminar of the University of Hull on 4 February, the Bedfordshire local history group Maypole Heritage on 12 February, and Solent Yacht Club on 15 February. Watch this space for details of other talks!

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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.