In my novel Pharaoh my Victorian protagonist Major Edward Mayne has a secret purpose for being with the Nile expedition, but he operates in the guise of an intelligence officer whose job is to scout ahead of the river column to spot obstacles and any evidence of enemy activity. He takes his sketchbook with him to record features of the river, and in his spare time back at camp draws scenes of river activity that he sends anonymously to The Illustrated London News for publication ....
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This photo shows Major Horatio Herbert Kitchener of the Royal Engineers, recognisable from the image of him years later as a Field Marshal in the famous First World War recruitment poster. Here we see him fresh from the Nile campaign of 1884-5, on the cusp of a career that would see his meteoric rise to Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, Commander-in-Chief in India and finally Secretary of State for War in 1914. The popular perception of Kitchener is built on that recruitment poster, which has become associated with the castigation of British leadership in the First World War. But in researching my novel Pharaoh ...
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The broadcaster and historian Dan Snow had written a moving tribute in The Radio Times to his grandfather’s experience as a merchant seaman during the Second World War, as part of the commemoration of the abatement of the Battle of the Atlantic seventy years ago that’s been taking place this summer in Liverpool and elsewhere. Because my grandfather was also a Battle of the Atlantic veteran I’ve wanted to post a few blogs remembering the role of the Merchant Navy, focusing on some of the less well-known aspects. One of those is that the battle was not just ...
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My blog (19 May) on my great-uncle’s experience as an RAF Lancaster bomber pilot during the Second World War has prompted several fascinating responses, not least from a brother of mine who had spent several seasons in the early 1990s working on archaeological sites in the Canadian High Arctic. What I hadn’t realised was that the sites he encountered were not just of prehistoric date ...
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I’ve just returned from a very exciting week of diving and underwater discovery. For some time now I’ve been on the trail of a shipwreck reported years ago by divers but never investigated. Three days ago I finally found it, having very nearly swum over the site without seeing it on the final day of diving ...
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My final post as guest-editor of 'The Afterword' on Canada's National Post newspaper:
This unusual author portrait was taken by my brother Alan near Tobermory in Lake Huron, one day in spring as the ice was breaking up. I’ve been passionate about diving since boyhood, and in my career as an underwater archaeologist I’ve dived all over the world. But I’ve always loved returning to Tobermory, the place where I did my first open-water dive in 1978. It isn’t just the extraordinarily well-preserved shipwrecks that draws me back ...
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My third post as guest-editor of 'The Afterword' for Canada's National Post newpaper:
When I’m in England I write my novels in a sixteenth-century half-timbered cottage beside a castle, and in Canada overlooking a 19th century wooden barn on our farm in southern Ontario. In the course of looking after the woodland on our farm I’ve felled many trees by axe and worked with timber a good deal, and that’s helped me to appreciate the extraordinary skill and tenacity of woodworkers in the past ...
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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 ...
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This 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 ...
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In celebration of the hardback publication of my novel Pharaoh in the UK, here's an excerpt from chapter 7. Part of the novel is set during the 1884-5 British expedition to rescue General Gordon from Khartoum, a story that becomes integral to the present-day action and the quest of Jack Howard and his team. Here we see my 19th century protagonist, Major Edward Mayne, sitting in the expedition camp beside the cataracts of the Nile and talking to his orderly Corporal Jones. Little do they know the significance of the creature shown in the print 'A Frightful Incident', and the incredible archaeological discovery that awaits them just across the river ....
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One 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 ...
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This 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 ...
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