Authors Electric

 Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was a British Politician, statesman, army officer and prolific writer. He wrote 33 books in 51 volumes over his lifetime. His fictional output comprised one novel and one short story. His main output however, comprised non-fiction. After he was elected as an an MP,  over 130 speeches and parliamentary answers were published in booklets and pamphlets. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953 for “ his mastery of historical description as well as for oratory in defending human values.” What is more surprising is that Churchill suffered from a manic depressive disorder and could spend long periods of time, sometimes months low on energy and totally unproductive. For years Churchill had avoided standing to close to balconies and train platforms. “ I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand back and get a pillar between me and the train. I don’t like to stand by the sid...

Sitting down here in the wilds of Leicestershire, back on family duty, I suddenly realised that I had a blog to do. Shouldn't have been a surprise, because it usually coincides with our turn to keep the home fires burning now that one of the Aged Ps is sadly no longer with us.   But it did raise the immediate question – what shall I write about? That, being a writer, is not a new question, obviously. In fact many AE blogsters ask from time to time where ideas come from, and how different people process them. As it happens my need for a subject matter coincided with some historical work I'm doing, and a couple of barely-related strands popped unbidden into my sights. One was the extraordinary suggestion/possibility that Abraham Lincoln had been shot because he was gay and refused to come out of the closet, and the other was the destruction of ancient monumental works of art or worship by the ‘new Puritans’ of ISIS. These subjects are hardly related, except that they are...

Everybody knows the Henry Ford bon mot. ‘History is bunk,’ the great man said.  Or didn’t, probably. Search hard enough (not very hard, at that) and you’ll discover several different versions, all claimed by someone as the one and only truth. ‘History is junk.’ ‘History is bunkum.’ ‘History is the junk.’ ‘History is the bunk.’    Or try Hermann Goering’s chilling giveaway of the Nazi character. ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.’ Ooh, nasty – except that what he probably said – an adaptation of a quote by the poet and playwright Hanns Johst – was ‘When I hear the word Kultur [which has subtle connotations in German anyway] I reach for my Browning.’ Aha! A sophisticated joke, perhaps. Does he mean a semi-automatic pistol, a medium machine gun – or the revered English poet, whose own ambiguity, for me, is best revealed in My Last Duchess? You tell me.    When I wrote my first version of my Rudolf Hess book, which HarperCollins publish...

I’ve never been much of a fan of conspiracy theories, but, to coin a phrase, I know a man who is. But I have always been a fascinated observer of how people in power lie and cheat, and how rationality bleeds away from the most dangerous and difficult human problems. We all know that war has no winners, we all know that wars will never end. And now, thanks to the wonders of ebookery, I’ve been able to revisit possibly my favourite wartime thriller. The conspiracy theory in question has been around for a long, long time, and it will not go away. It is about an event so bizarre that the truth will never, obviously, be known. That’s the beauty of the animal. You don’t have study philosophy very long to hit the sixty four thousand dollar question. What is truth? Consider this. My book, Death Orders, which will hit the cyber world in the next couple of weeks via Endeavour Press, is about the supposed death of a man who supposedly flew to England in a Messerschmitt in...