Aspects of History

Empress Matilda: Queen of the Romans, Ruler of the English is a new biography by the University of Cambridge historian Elisabeth van Houts. The subject of the book, Empress Matilda, is one of the most fascinating and, arguably, one of the most overlooked characters in medieval English history. The biography is told in three parts.

Welcome back to Aspects of History, Thomas. Your new book, The Fifth Crusade, shines a light on one of the least familiar but most consequential expeditions of the Crusading era. What first drew you to this overlooked campaign and what is it exactly that means it has tended to remain in the shadow of the Third Crusade and figures such as Richard the Lionheart and Saladin? The thing that first drew me to the Fifth Crusade was the incredible setting.

Antonia Senior’s exceptional new book opens with a bold claim: that an innocent-looking meeting between Comintern spymaster Arnold Deutsch and the 22-year-old Harold ‘Kim’ Philby on a London park bench in June 1934 ‘would change history and help to gift Joseph Stalin an empire’.

Picture the straits as plumes of smoke rise above the abandoned Acropolis of Athens just a handful of miles away. The Persian armada lies in wait and the King of Kings, Xerxes, watches from the shore. An unlikely Greek alliance wavers on the brink of certain defeat, debating whether to flee and avoid naval engagement but for one man, Themistocles, who will be remembered as the saviour of Greece by nightfall the next day.

One always approaches the publication of a new book regarding Rasputin with a certain amount of dread; will it have something new to say, or will it simply peddle the old misconceptions and prejudices where the ‘infamous’ Siberian sorcerer is concerned? Having come at the subject myself as an author and tried as best I could to correct some of the misimpressions about this rather fascinating man, I opened my review copy of Antony Beevor’s new book with rather a dramatic, apprehensive flourish.

Welcome to Aspects of History, Elizabeth, and congratulations on the release of Empress Matilda: Queen of the Romans, Ruler of the English. Matilda was made regent of northern Italy by her husband, the Holy Roman Emperor, at the age of just sixteen. Do you think this was force of circumstance, or do you think that this shows that her extraordinary capabilities were already being recognised at that young age? A combination of both.

Within the pages of Women of SOE, there are many incredible stories reflecting every human trait from heroism to cowardice, bravery to fear, love to betrayal, loyalty to selfishness. The book’s aim is to show these women (and the men they worked with) as human beings, just like us, ordinary, but who somehow came to do the most extraordinary work across Nazi-occupied Europe.

In my new biography of Empress Matilda, I have emphasised Matilda’s capacity for collaboration with the men surrounding her, revealing her concomitant skill of persuasion and negotiation. Nevertheless, it is clear from her life story that there were moments that these skills did not produce the results she hoped for.

When we think of the Crusades, the first things that come to mind are 12th-century characters such as Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, locked in combat for control of the Holy Land. The average medieval person, though, would have had a much richer understanding which included Crusades to southern France, Spain, the Baltic, and – fascinatingly – Egypt.

Welcome Daria. Congratulations on the publication of your first novel Sawadika American Girl. What made you decide to write a historical fiction inspired by your own experiences as a Third Culture Kid (TCK) in Bangkok during the Vietnam War? Thank you so much. I’m excited to share Sawadika American Girl with the world. Most people aren’t aware that, during the Vietnam War, Thailand served as a major US military outpost with over eight military bases scattered throughout the kingdom.