biography

UK news in brief

Rare photographs of Second World War filmmaking revealed To mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day, Historic England’s Archive has released a collection of photographs capturing behind-the-scenes stills of RAF film productions. The collection was put together by Dorothy ‘Knicky’…

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MHM Book Awards 2025

The ballots have been cast, the votes counted, and we are delighted to announce the winners of the MHM Book Awards. We curated a list of 2024’s best military history titles, and asked you, our readers, to vote for your…

Marten's Poltava

The making of Russia

In our special feature, Stephen Roberts examines first the life of Peter the Great, a pivotal figure in Russian history, then looks in detail at the Battle of Poltava that established Russia for the first time as a major power on the European stage.

Poetic portents of spring

By the time you read this, February fill dyke will be over for another year and March will (perhaps) have come in like a lion. Sherds is always glad when winter is over, but in the depths of the cold, dark, and grey weeks of January and February there is one sure way to find warmth and consolation – by reaching for a book called Next to Nature, an anthology of the ‘Word from Wormingford’ diary columns that Ronald Blythe wrote for many years for the Church Times.

Howard Carter: From Tracer to Tutankhamun

REVIEW BY SARAH GRIFFITHS This slim ‘Spotlight’ volume is the first in a new series of EES publications highlighting the society’s collections and projects, and it is only fitting that the first should focus on the work of Howard Carter.…

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MHM Book Awards 2025

Military History Matters has curated a list of 2024’s best military history titles: the nominees for this year’s MHM Book Awards. Our selection includes some of the best-researched, most-insightful, and most-readable titles reviewed and featured in the magazine over the…

Helen Fry

The historian and best-selling author on her obsession with espionage, and why she will always admire Edith Cavell.

Race for the skies

William Robinson Clarke breached the colour bar to become Britain’s first Black combat pilot. Clive Webb reveals how a chance discovery in the RAF Museum archive allowed his story finally to be told.

Oliver Cromwell: Commander in Chief

REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD It is now three years since Bristol University historian Ronald Hutton’s The Making of Oliver Cromwell appeared. That earlier volume took Britain’s first commoner head of state from his origins as a minor East Anglian landowner…

Winston Churchill

REVIEW BY TAYLOR DOWNING The military historian Peter Caddick-Adams has written this witty and enjoyable political biography of Winston Churchill. Unlike the multivolume authorised biography written mostly by Sir Martin Gilbert – which contained more than three million words –…

Tales from ‘the Bone Room’

I would like to dedicate these pages to my PhD supervisor, Eric Higgs. After studying at the London School of Economics, he bought a hill farm in Shropshire at the outset of the Second World War, and spent the following decade rearing sheep and cattle, with the objective, he once told me, of breeding miniature versions of the former.

War Classics – Flashman

Any novelist approaching a publisher with an idea for a series of stories centred around a cowardly, bullying racist, who is also a serial philanderer, would nowadays be very quickly shown the door. Yet George MacDonald Fraser achieved celebrity and surprising academic respect for just such a series, which consisted of 12 books published between 1969 and 2005.

Sherds CA 413

As part of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, one of the last acts of the outgoing government was to authorise Historic England to extend the blue plaques scheme to the whole of England.