Category: History

Historians in Britain need to ask the right questions about Europe

Following the surprise result of the General Elections earlier this month historians in Britain have reopened the debate about Europe. Depending on where you stand, Britain is either part of Europe, or a strange place across the Channel you can travel to. The Historians for Britain who have come out in favour of ‘fundamental changes… Continue reading Historians in Britain need to ask the right questions about Europe

A historian in journalism – one week into the job

Just over one week into my new job at the press agency I must say I absolutely love it. Working at the foreign languages desk I spend most of my day monitoring the news coming in from our correspondents all over the world via the various ‘queues’ on my computer screen and see if any… Continue reading A historian in journalism – one week into the job

The English Revolution and its Patriotic Exiles

Despite the plethora of literature that has been published on the English Revolution and Restoration over the years, the topic of exile during this most exciting period of British history remains an understudied area. There is still much unseen primary source material to be uncovered in European and North American archives and plenty of gaps… Continue reading The English Revolution and its Patriotic Exiles

Divided Heaven – 25 years later

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall I have finally finished reading Divided Heaven by the East German writer Christa Wolf. It is a love story ended by the separation of the two Germanies, completed by the construction of the Wall, which aimed to prevent the defection of Eastern Germans to the West.… Continue reading Divided Heaven – 25 years later

Life outside academia

There is life outside academia, and by that I don’t mean that people are having more fun elsewhere. I am only suggesting that an academic career is not the natural, or even the most desirable outcome of a university degree. As a lecturer in early modern history at a post-1992 university I know that only… Continue reading Life outside academia

Wolfenbüttel – where Jägermeister and scholarship meet

The little northern German town of Wolfenbüttel is known for two things: Jägermeister and the Herzog August Bibliothek or HAB. While the popular digestif is made with a large variety of herbs and spices, the HAB research library is the meeting place of a large variety of scholars from all around the world, who gather… Continue reading Wolfenbüttel – where Jägermeister and scholarship meet

Laughing about Hitler

Is it ok to laugh about Hitler? This seems to be the one big question critics have been asking themselves about Timor Vermes’s Look Who’s Back – a novel about Adolf Hitler waking up in 21st-century Berlin seeing a confusingly modern world through a Nazi lense. Some teenage boys playing football on a field must… Continue reading Laughing about Hitler

Lies, secrets and death on the eve of the Glorious Revolution

The Bitter Trade by Piers Alexander is a historical novel set in the murky world of London’s coffee houses on the eve of the Glorious Revolution. The son of an English dissenter and a French Huguenot, its young redhead hero Calumny Spinks lives under the shadow of his father’s dark secret dating back to Oliver… Continue reading Lies, secrets and death on the eve of the Glorious Revolution

Tracking down the regicides

I don’t read much popular history, and that is probably a mistake. By ignoring countless works written for a mass audience I miss what attracts most people to my subject area: a good story that is actually true, or at least could be true, reconstructed from sources scattered all over the archives and joined by… Continue reading Tracking down the regicides