All articles in Biography & Memoir
10th February, 2016 in Biography & Memoir, Society & Culture
Mandela: From prison cell to president
Nelson Mandela lived one of the most remarkable lives of the twentieth century. Growing up in an era of oppression and racial segregation in South Africa, he devoted his life to fighting for an equal and democratic society and championed social justice. Imprisoned for almost thre…
10th February, 2016 in Biography & Memoir, History, Society & Culture
Nelson Mandela: Release and reconciliation
Mandela was released from prison on 11 February 1990. Despite elaborate planning, the event flirted with fiasco. A vast crowd thronged the sweltering Grand Parade in Cape Town, waiting for hours. An unruly fringe began to loot shop windows; police fired rubber bullets and shotgun…
5th February, 2016 in Biography & Memoir, History
The top ten longest-reigning British monarchs
On 9 September 2015, Queen Elizabeth II, having previously surpassed her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria, in 2007, to become the longest-lived British monarch, became the longest-reigning British monarch. She can also lay claim to being the world’s oldest reigning monarch…
14th January, 2016 in Biography & Memoir, Entertainment
Octopussy: My private revolution
In Shooting 007, beloved cameraman and director of photography Alec Mills, a veteran of seven James Bond movies, tells the inside story of his twenty years of filming cinema’s most famous secret agent. Among many humorous and touching anecdotes, Mills reveals how he became an int…
13th January, 2016 in Biography & Memoir, Military
Private Henry Tandey VC and Adolf Hitler
The story of Private Henry Tandey VC, DCM, MM has once again entered the public domain following the publication of Michael Morpurgo’s latest book An Eagle in the Snow and sadly, in my opinion, for the wrong reasons. In 2010, I came across the story of Adolf Hitler’s life being s…
13th January, 2016 in Biography & Memoir, Women in History
Re-examining the life of Anne Frank
The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most famous – and bestselling – books of all time. Yet the girl who wrote it remains an enigma. The real Anne Frank has been hidden again, lost, behind the phenomenon of her posthumously published Diary. In the book I have just completed I ar…
5th January, 2016 in Biography & Memoir, History
The betrayal of Richard III
Scrape away the accumulated wealth of tainted evidence which has disfigured the memory of Richard III for the past 500 years and there is really very little that remains mysterious about the outlines of his story. In fact it can be summed up in one sentence: he accepted his dead…
4th January, 2016 in Biography & Memoir, History
Thomas Cromwell and the ‘ungoodly’ executioner
Edward Hall, the Tudor historian, completes his account of the last moments of Thomas Cromwell, after his last speech and prayer, in this way: Cromwell ‘godly and lovingly exhorted them that were about him on the scaffold’ and committed his soul to God, then ‘patiently suffered t…
4th January, 2016 in Biography & Memoir, History
Thomas Cromwell and the ‘Catholic faith’
Thomas Cromwell’s last words and moments on 28 July 1540 continue to cause quite a lot of discussion, and the following article is offered to try and clarify some points. In Tudor times, condemned traitors were supposed to confess, abjectly and utterly, to the crimes of which the…
4th January, 2016 in Biography & Memoir, History
Thomas Cromwell and the fall of Anne Boleyn
Truth is stranger than fiction, as the saying goes. But telling the two apart is not always easy, especially in a subject as fraught as the fall of Anne Boleyn. According to most biographies or other supposedly ‘factual’ accounts, with notable exceptions like George Bernard’s, An…
18th December, 2015 in Biography & Memoir, Society & Culture
The reality of working for the Prime Minister
‘To work for a Prime Minister is a privilege only less than being Prime Minister himself. It compensates for the temporary destruction of one’s private life; in return for total commitment it offers continuous excitement. To enjoy it to the full, it should never be out of one’s m…
18th December, 2015 in Biography & Memoir, History, Women in History
Margaret Douglas: The other Tudor princess
Margaret Douglas, Henry VIII’s once beloved niece, is a somewhat shadowy and mysterious character in Tudor history who ended up taking stage in the bitter struggle for power during Henry’s reign. She was born in a state of emergency in a Border keep where rain dripped from…