Amberley Blog

Pretender (/pr1'ten.dər/) nounOne who puts forth a claim, or aspires to or aims at something; a claimant, candidate, or aspirant. Five hundred years since they walked and talked upon this earth, the Tudor dynasty remains a profitable and captivating industry steeped in our nation’s collective consciousness, with little equal. For better or worse, the five monarchs that ruled between 1485...

Suppose you made a mistake – a monumental mistake. Suppose you married a young lady after a short acquaintance only to find she was not what you’d expected. Suppose, to compound matters, she thought the same about you; that while you found her to be as spoilt as she was beautiful, as frivolous and unpredictable as she was spirited, she...

I was delighted when I was asked to write a book about Stockport. Although I am not a ‘born and bred Stopfordian’, I have spent several decades of my life living there, and my children were brought up there. Writing a book about Stockport presents challenges. When I was first embarking on this project, a retired academic friend rather disparagingly...

I’ve written nearly a dozen books now on Sussex but as a Brightonian it is always the greatest honour to be asked to write about my hometown, so I was delighted to be asked by Amberley to write the latest book in the popular ‘Celebrating’ series on Brighton and Hove. After all, with all that the ‘Terrible Twenties’ have thrown...

The heritage of Roman Verulamium and the medieval monastery of St Albans are no secret. But the town’s later history is less well known. The Charter Borough, created following the dissolution of the monastery, is not untypical of other English towns, but its proximity to London on the main route to the Northwest increased its popularity as a residence for...

In the years prior to my time in the railway-tourism industry and before I had learned to drive, my spare time was often filled through extensive use of regional Westcountry bus services, trains from Taunton Station and, somewhat extensively, my own two feet. During July of 2014, I found myself on a hot, dry summer's walk between Wells and Glastonbury...

In my new book 'The Dignity of Labour. Image, Work and Identity in the Roman World' (published by Amberley on January 2021) I examine how images were used by some workers and professionals in the Roman world to publicly express their working identities in cultural rather than purely economic terms. The book is also a story of how art depicting...

The great wooden doors of the cathedral swung open on their iron hinges. Sunlight flooded in, casting long shadows across the stone floor. A gust of wind blasted in, chilling the necks of those seated nearby. Inside, the worshipers – sitting on the pews in neat ranks – turned their heads away from the pulpit to look at the intruder...

Was butter the real reason Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa to conquer the Soviet Union? Napoleon Bonaparte allegedly once said “An army marches on its’ stomach”, but to paraphrase him there is a strong case to say that the Germans who invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 were “an Army marching for its stomach.” Ever since the Nazis launched the largest...

The role of technical experts such as engineers, scientists, and mathematicians in modern warfare, is often indispensable. John Robert Vernon Dolphin, born in 1905 in the small village of Christleton, just outside Chester, was just such a technical expert. He was born into a well-to-do scientific family, with a father who worked as a metallurgist for a copper refining company...