My second post as guest-editor of 'The Afterword' for Canada's National Post newspaper:
Like
many authors I’m often asked for writerly advice, and my inclination is to
defer to past masters where possible. In the last few years I’ve read a lot of
19th century biography as research for my novels, and I’ve just
finished the marvellously-named George Frisbee Hoar’s Autobiography of Seventy Years, published in 1904. As well as being
one of the most remarkable US politicians of his day, Hoar was a prominent antiquarian
whose personal copy of Heinrich Schliemann’s Mycenae came into my possession as I was writing my novel The Mask of Troy ...
Read MoreThis week I'm guest-editing 'The Afterword' for the National Post, one of Canada's national papers with a circulation of nearly a million. Here's my first post:
My
most recent novel, Pharaoh, is really
a novel within a novel, a modern-day archaeological adventure also set in the
late 19th century during the doomed British attempt to relieve
General Gordon in Khartoum. I’ve always been fascinated by British colonial
history, party because of my own family background – in this case, an ancestor
who was a Royal Engineers officer and chair of the ‘Gordon Relics Committee’,
responsible for safeguarding Gordon’s collection of ethnographic and
archaeological materials after his death. During my research I immersed myself
in first-hand accounts and artefacts ...
Read MoreOne of my great-great uncles, Norman Martin Gibbins, was a Cambridge mathematician and chess aficionado whose main claim to fame was a paper he published in The Mathematical Gazette in 1944 entitled ‘Chess in Three and Four Dimensions.’ During the First World War, after being wounded as an infantry officer on the Western Front, he’d worked as a cipher officer for military intelligence ...
Read MoreThis film of me underwater was taken by my brother Alan one day in April as the ice was breaking up on Lake Huron in Ontario, Canada …
Read MoreWith the celebrations this week of the seventieth anniversary of the Dambusters Raid, I have special reason to remember one of the other dambuster raids carried out by RAF Bomber Command during the Second World War - the attempt in December 1944 to breach the Urft and Schwammenauel Dams on the Ruhr River, directly in the path of the US 9th Army as it fought through the Hürtgen Forest into Germany ...
Read More