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A Time in Paris is the new book by historical novelist David Lawday, the author of the critically-acclaimed book 'Danton'.As a correspondent for the Economist and U.S. News and World Report, David Lawday lived in France for many years, marrying a French woman and raising his two children there. His long experience of France, in the eyes of an Economist reviewer, made him "an ideal biographer" of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, a highly influential French statesman who held positions close to the top of a number of French regimes, notably that of Napoleon Bonaparte. Lawday's biography of the controversial Talleyrand, Napoleon's Master: A Life of Prince Talleyrand, was published in 2006.David's new book is a powerful historical novel which explores unlikely ties and how war changes hearts, set during one of the turning points in world history. The Siege of Paris – the impact of which is still felt today - has hitherto been under-explored by historians. David certainly helps to bring the subject to life in this fascinating novel. Check out David's Amazon book page here.  

In this episode, we interview Historian, Journalist & New York Times bestselling Author Evan Thomas about his brand new book, Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War.Road to Surrender is a riveting, immersive account of the agonizing decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan. To bring these critical events to vivid life Evan Thomas draws on the diaries and correspondence of three key players - Stimson (American Secretary of War), Togo (Japanese Foreign Minister) and Spaatz (head of strategic bombing in the Pacific). He lays out the behind-the-scenes thoughts, feelings, motivations, and decision-making of three people who changed history.   Through rare access to diaries and personal discussions we have insight into the moral dilemmas faced on both sides and how the key political decision makers grappled with these impossibly difficult decisions and contemplated the immense weight of their historic decision. “In this meticulously crafted and vivid account, Evan Thomas tells the gripping and terrifying story of the last days of the Second World War in the Pacific” - Margaret MacMillan, author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us.Check out the book here on Amazon. 

US President Biden has just finished his visit to Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. What are the historical connections? Can it be termed a success? If so, for who(m)? The Editorial team discuss ...For terms of use, please visit www.versushistory.com

We are delighted to announce the launch of the Versus History Essay Prize 2023 (#VHEssayPrize). Full details can found via the links below. Please spread the word to anyone and everyone who may (or may not!) be interested! The webpage link for the #VHEssayPrize is here.The questions for the #VHEssayPrize are here. To contact Versus History via Twitter about the #VHEssayPrize, that link is here. 

In this episode, we interview actor, historian, podcaster and playwright Dominic Frisby about evacuation from London during WW2. Dominic is responsible for 'Kisses on a Postcard.' To set the scene, it is 1940. Two boys from London, Terry and Jack, aged seven and eleven, are being evacuated to escape German bombing. They end up in Cornwall, where they spend the next four years. The intensely moving musical by Terence Frisby tells the unforgettable story of those boys and their "second childhood". Full of surprising humour and memorable songs, this is a unique portrait of an extraordinary time in British history. "Enchanting, profoundly moving and delightful," Charles Spencer, the Telegraph. Starring John Owen-Jones, Katie Secombe, Rosie Cavaliero, Marcia Warren, Evie Hoskins, Ian Virgo, James Clyde, Peter Temple and others.Check out Kisses on a PostcardFollow Dominic Frisby on Twitter

In this exciting episode of the Versus History Podcast, we have something a little different. We discuss the 1990s and the wonderfully eclectic and inventive sounds it spawned, from Britpop's Oasis, Blur and Pulp to Jungle / Drum and Bass and Shy FX, General Levy and UK Apachi.We conclude with a guest mix from Leicester's and UMC Management's very own DJ Juvenile / DJ Juvie, playing an hour of original 90s-inspired Jungle from vinyl. Enjoy!For terms of use, please visit www.versushistory.com

In this episode, we interview Kate Strasdin, who is a dress historian who has been fascinated by old clothes since she was a child.  Her new book, 'The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes: Secrets from a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe' is a tour de force of History! Kate is a lecturer in Cultural Studies at Falmouth University and an Instagram sensation!In 2016 she was given an anonymous album full of annotated dress swatches that had been kept in a trunk for over fifty years, its original keeper unknown. She spent the next six years unlocking its secrets and wrote the following book ...The hidden fabric of a Victorian woman's life - from family and friends to industry and Empire - told through her unique textile scrapbook.In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of her life and times. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes.Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Strasdin spent the next six years unravelling the secrets contained within the album's pages.Piece by piece, she charts Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years. Fragments of cloth become windows into Victorian life: pirates in Borneo, the complicated etiquette of mourning, poisonous dyes, the British Empire in full swing, rioting over working conditions and the terrible human cost of Britain's cotton industry.This is life writing that celebrates ordinary people: the hidden figures, the participants in everyday life. Through the evidence of waistcoats, ball gowns and mourning outfits, Strasdin lays bare the whole of human experience in the most intimate of mediums: the clothes we choose to wear.For terms of use, please visit www.versushistory.com

In this episode, the editorial team meets at the Future Learning Summit to discuss the news today (25/02/23). We look at AI, Presidents, railway strikes, nationalisation and much, much more besides ...For terms of use, please visit www.versushistory.com

Join us for this episode where we check out the big news stories of the week and investigate the historical connections and correlations.For terms of use, please visit www.versushistory.com

In this episode of the Versus History Podcast, we are joined by Mandy Robotham. She is a Globe and Mail, USA Today, and UK, Canadian, US and Australian Kindle Top 100 bestseller. She has been an aspiring author from the age of nine, but was waylaid by journalism and later enticed by birth. She’s now a former midwife who writes about birth, death, love and everything else in between. She graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Oxford Brookes University. In this episode, Mandy discusses her new book, The War Pianist, as well as many other topics, such as approaches to writing historical fiction, techniques and how to go about the research. For terms of use, please visit www.versushistory.com

Jungle. Drum & Bass. Its impressively long history goes back to the very early 1990s, synthesising elements of rave, house and techno, but also reggae and Soundsystem culture. MC Co-Gee is a musician and artist who needs no introduction to fans of Jungle, Drum & Bass and Reggae. He was the very first Jungle MC on London's premier Jungle Radio Station, Kool FM 94.5 / Kool LDN, which ran between 1991 and 2023, having served microphone duties on the station for its entire tenure. He started his musical career on a Soundsystem, before migrating towards Jungle in the early 1990's.In this interview, we discuss everything, from his work on Kool FM to his career as an MC to the allure of UK Garage to the decline of the soundsystems and the rise of Jungle.For terms of use, please visit www.versushistory.com

Chat GPT has been causing quite a stir on social media and in the news. But how revolutionary is it? Does all technological change have this much impact? What other changes have caused consternation through history? Find out in this episode, where the entire editorial team of Versus History gather round to discuss!For terms of use, please visit www.versushistory.com

In this episode of the Versus History Podcast, we welcome back Historian Damien Lewis to discuss his new book 'SAS Brothers in Arms'.Damien Lewis' new bestseller tells the action-packed, riveting story of the band of mavericks and visionaries who made the SAS. Using hitherto untold stories and new archival sources, Damien Lewis follows one close-knit band of warriors from the SAS foundation through to the Italian landings - chronicling the extraordinary part they played as the tide of the Second World War truly turned in the Allied's favour. This is a narrative of wall-to-wall do-or-die action and daring, chronicling the exploits of some of the most highly-decorated soldiers of the twentieth-century.For terms of use, please visit www.versushistory.com

Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. She is the author of The Amber Fury, The Children of Jocasta, and A Thousand Ships, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020. Her non-fiction book about women in Greek Myth, Pandora’s Jar, was a New York Times Bestseller in 2022. She has written and performed eight series of her BBC Radio 4 show, Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. In 2015 she was awarded the Classical Association Prize for her work in bringing Classics to a wider audience. Stone Blind is her fourth novel.So to mortal men, we are monsters. Because of our flight, our strength. They fear us, so they call us monsters.’Medusa is the sole mortal in a family of gods. Growing up with her Gorgon sisters, she begins to realize that she is the only one who experiences change, the only one who can be hurt. And her mortal lifespan gives her an urgency that her family will never know.When the sea god Poseidon commits an unforgivable act in the temple of Athene, the goddess takes her revenge where she can – and Medusa is changed forever. Writhing snakes replace her hair, and her gaze now turns any living creature to stone. The power cannot be controlled: Medusa can look at nothing without destroying it. She is condemned to a life of shadows and darkness.Until Perseus embarks upon a quest to fetch the head of a Gorgon . . .In Stone Blind, Natalie Haynes – the Women’s Prize-shortlisted author of A Thousand Ships – brings the infamous Medusa to life as you have never seen her before . . .

In this episode, the editorial team got together to talk about a small slice of the history that they encountered during their summer travels and also to announce the winner of the amazing Wolfson History Prize 2022 book bonanza!

In the 150th episode of the Versus History Podcast, we interview author Eva Taylor about her new book, 'Sabine's War'. The book notes are below: Sabine’s War is the previously untold story of a remarkable resistance fighter and her incredible story of survival against the odds.   When Germany invaded Holland in May 1940, Sabine Zuur joined the resistance movement without a moment’s hesitation aged just 22. Helping to hide those avoiding the German authorities, she was soon betrayed and subjected to repeated violent interrogations. Many of her friends were executed but Sabine was instead sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp, via the Amersfoort and Ravensbrück camps. Enduring gruelling conditions and backbreaking forced manual labour, she survived through a combination of guile and good fortune.   But it was only after Sabine’s death that her daughter Eva discovered an archive of letters detailing her extraordinary life, revealing a rich inner world and a past she had discussed little. Amongst them were declarations of love from pilot Taro, shot down in his Spitfire over northern France aged just 26; letters to her mother smuggled out in her prison laundry; and passionate, creepy missives from a German professional criminal named Gebele who would ultimately save Sabine’s life. She emerges from this correspondence as a woman with an indefinable aura, somehow in control of her own destiny even when to all intents and purposes she was not.   A transfixing story of survival, Sabine’s War captures a remarkable life in the words of the young woman who lived it.For terms of use, please visit www.versushistory.com

An interview with Dr Clare Jackson, the winner of Wolfson History Prize 2022 about her book, ‘Devil-Land:England Under Siege, 1588-1688′. Clare is the Senior tutor of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. The description for the book:Among foreign observers, seventeenth-century England was known as ‘Devil-Land’: a diabolical country of fallen angels, torn apart by rebellion, religious extremism and royal collapse. Clare Jackson’s dazzling account of English history’s most radical era tells the story of a nation in a state of near continual crisis.As an unmarried, childless heretic, Elizabeth I was regarded with horror by Catholic Europe, while her Stuart successors, James I and Charles I, were seen as impecunious and incompetent, unable to manage their three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. The traumatic civil wars, regicide and a republican Commonwealth were followed by the floundering rule of Charles II and James II, before William of Orange invaded and a new order was imposed.Devil-Land reveals England as, in many ways, a ‘failed state’: endemically unstable and rocked by devastating events from the Gunpowder Plot to the Great Fire of London. Catastrophe nevertheless bred creativity, and Jackson makes brilliant use of eyewitness accounts – many penned by stupefied foreigners – to dramatize her great story. Starting on the eve of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and concluding with a not-so ‘Glorious Revolution’ a hundred years later, Devil-Land is a spectacular reinterpretation of England’s vexed and enthralling past.To check the book out, visit the link here.For more on the Wolfson History Prize, here is the link. For Clare's website, visit here.

This is a Wolfson History Prize 2022 Special! In this special interview we chat with Professor Frances Stavrakopoulou (@ProfFrancesca) about her new book 'God: An Anatomy'. This was a nominee for the 2022 Wolfson History Prize. The description of the book is here:Three thousand years ago, in the Southwest Asian lands we now call Israel and Palestine, a group of people worshipped a complex pantheon of deities, led by a father god called El. El had seventy children, who were gods in their own right. One of them, a minor storm deity known as Yahweh, had a body, a wife, offspring and colleagues. He fought monsters and mortals, gorged on food and wine, wrote books, and took walks and naps. He would become something far larger and far more abstract: the God of the great monotheistic religions. The Bible has shaped our ideas about God and religion, but also our cultural preferences about human existence and experience; our concept of life and death; our attitude to sex and gender; our habits of eating and drinking; our understanding of history. Examining God’s body, from his head to his hands, feet and genitals, Francesca Stavrakopoulou shows how the Western idea of God developed. She explores the places and artefacts that shaped our view of this singular God and the ancient religions and societies of the biblical world. She analyses not only the origins of our oldest religions, but also the origins of Western culture.For terms of use, please visit www.versushistory.com

Mr. Barry Cooper’s educational career spans 20 years, 3 continents, and 4 prestigious schools in London, Edinburgh, Shanghai and Dubai. Most recently, he shaped the academic curriculum for the newly launched Brighton College Dubai, while also finding time to create and curate a new Arts festival. Previously he championed the IB Diploma programme for History at Wellington College Shanghai, after 8 years on the leadership team at leading Scottish boarding school Loretto just outside Edinburgh. He started his career at Epsom College, as teacher of History and a residential Assistant Housemaster.Barry read History at St Andrews and then took his master’s degree at Stirling with a focus on the historiography of The Crusades. He also has the UK National Professional Qualification for Headship.As well as being a keen student of history Barry also has an interest in Japanese Print Art, which he collects (a habit picked up from three years in Asia). 

In this episode, we interview Karina Urbach, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of London about her brand new book. So what happened to the books that were too valuable for the Nazis to burn?Alice Urbach had her own cooking school in Vienna, but in 1938 she was forced to flee to England, like so many others. Her younger son was imprisoned in Dachau, and her older son, having emigrated to the United States, became an intelligence officer in the struggle against the Nazis. Returning to the ruins of Vienna in the late 1940s, she discovers that her bestselling cookbook has been published under someone else's name. Now, eighty years later, the historian Karina Urbach - Alice's granddaughter - sets out to uncover the truth behind the stolen cookbook, and tells the story of a family torn apart by the Nazi regime, of a woman who, with her unwavering passion for cooking, survived the horror and losses of the Holocaust to begin a new life in America.Impeccably researched and incredibly moving, Alice's Book sheds light on an untold chapter in the history of Nazi crimes against Jewish authors.