Did they really have to fight to the finish?

Controversy of the week The art of the ...

The first five pages of my new novel, Small Acts of Resistance, a love story set during the First World War, have taken a somewhat circuitous route to print. Their journey into being started over twen

On a beautiful summer’s morning almost 110 years ago, men of the British Army stepped out into no-man’s land at 7.30am. It was 1 July 1916, and the start of what was then called ‘The Big Push’. With h

Glasgow, 1942. The Carl Rosa Opera Company was in town to perform Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Tickets had been snapped up by local people – including many who didn’t really know what an opera was. The

Why on earth would I want to walk to Auschwitz, the biggest site of mass murder on the far side of Poland? The fact that I’d already walked half the distance is only part of the answer. Two years earl

Did you know that Thomas Müntzer, leader of the German Peasants’ War in 1525, used a rainbow flag to rally his followers? It’s an aptly exuberant image for the radical charisma of Müntzer, and for the