Amberley Blog

This is the story of how the Luftwaffe was utterly defeated on the Eastern Front. What’s the best thing about writing history? For me that’s easy. Stepping back in time into the shoes of another generation and looking around at the world through their eyes, and as you look around you can read what they read, touch what they touched...

Toni Mount is back with another fascinating look at everyday life in the middle ages. Dragon’s Blood & Willow Bark: The Mysteries of Medieval Medicine takes you on a journey through centuries of medical progress, from the ancient to the modern era. Packed full of intriguing anecdotes you’ll discover the elusive female physicians of the middle ages, medicine and the...

Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, won’t go away, but we always see him out of the corner of our eye. In panoramic sixteenth-century paintings like those showing the Field of Cloth of Gold and the sinking of the Mary Rose he is usually somewhere just behind the king. Seventeenth-century sight-seers in the Tower of London were shown two great jousting...

The British Railways Modernisation Plan of 1955 brought many innovations, but most visible to the layman or ordinary rail passenger was the replacement of steam by diesel locomotives. It should have been a time for clear vision, decisiveness and a firm hand on the tiller. Instead, screeching and clattering over the points went the bizarre twenty-strong Metro-Vick Co-Bo class and...

After the publication of my book Jane Austen In Her Own Words & The Words of Those Who Knew Her I was asked to compile a volume containing all the Austen family biographical material which I had used. I was also asked to trace the development of the biographical knowledge of Jane Austen's life. Jane Austen by Cassandra Austen (Amberley...

Ryan Giggs, OBE, was born in Cardiff on 29 November 1973 and made his senior debut for Manchester United in 1990. He became a first team regular at Old Trafford during the 1991-92 season and went on to score 168 goals in more than 960 competitive games for the club, as well as gaining 64 caps for Wales and playing...

History is full of myths – and a prime example is the so-called WARS OF THE ROSES - a name which has now become so well-known that it is difficult to avoid using it, but a name which was only invented two or three hundred years after the event it purports to describe. The traditional story of THE WARS OF THE...

By the early 20th century, hundreds of thousands of images had become available showing women in varying degrees of undress. Printed with postcard backs, in Britain the trade in these erotic cards was hidden, and they were often sold ‘under the counter’ in tobacconists, newsagents and bookshops... But, as Nigel Sadler reveals in his new book, in earlier years the aim...

I am not a very good tourist. I find it difficult just to go somewhere and enjoy looking around for its own sake – I need an added purpose like taking photos to show to friends or colleagues. So writing a book about the Bristol Avon was ideal for me – between January and August of this year I got...

Great British Eccentrics: 7 of the most peculiar people in history From the Scottish physician who pronounced lobsters as being capable of love and ‘damned crabs’ as having hearts of stone, to the peculiar aristocrat who invented a tiny gun for shooting wasps, Britain has long been a stronghold of eccentricity and peculiar behaviour In his new book, Great British Eccentrics...