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

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

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

An old man lives at the bottom of my garden. His name is Robert Barkus, or Bakehouse, or Bagust. Nobody is quite sure. But I often sense him around when I’m gardening, and I’ve found out a fair bit ab

Even the smallest, quietest places have stories to tell, and they are best told on foot. Like the one in this small, quiet place in the East Midlands, which forged the most honest war writer of them all.

Reading Laura Mauro’s “Japanese Toilet Ghosts” [FT459:30-35], reminded me of a less well known fear in the Western world, which –according to the modern rabbinical Internet resource site TheTorah.com