Author: Douglas Boyd

Lore Schindler was ten years old when her dentist father Harry was arrested by the Gestapo in Berlin and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. ...

Forget the adventure stories of James Bond, Kim Philby, Klaus Fuchs and co. espionage is not just a boys game. As long as there has been conflict,...

The names of few medieval monarchs and their queens are better known than Eleanor of Aquitaine, uniquely queen of France and queen of England, and ...

The October Revolution happened in November 1917. Later Soviet propaganda pretended for several decades that it was the will of the people, but in ...

After the guns fell silent in May 1945, the USSR resumed its clandestine warfare against the western democracies. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin inst...

D-Day, 6 June 1944; a day that has gone down in history as one of the most crucial steps towards Allied victory of the Second World War. But what i...

Of the 2.3 million National Servicemen conscripted during the Cold War, 4,200 attended the secret Joint Services School for Linguists, tasked with ...

Famous for Calvados apple brandy and Camembert cheese, Normandy is a green and pleasant land now dotted with thousands of British-owned second home...

All you need for a plague to go pandemic are population clusters and travellers spreading the bacterial or viral pathogens. Many prehistoric civili...

Winston Churchill called it the unknown war. Unlike the long stalemate of the Western Front, the conflict 191418 between the Russian Empire and the...

Eleanor of Aquitaine was the only person ever to sit on the thrones of both France and England. In this account of the turbulent adventures of the ...

After watching a D-Day film, do you wonder why no French units took part in the invasion of their own German-occupied country? General Charles De G...

The key to getting on with our closest Continental neighbours is to know the truth about what they endured during the German Occupation in the Seco...

When people think of Richard the Lionheart they recall the scene at the end of every Robin Hood epic when he returns from the Crusades to punish hi...

What did it mean when Vladimir Putin stepped down from president to prime minister of Russia in 2008 and bounced to the top again in 2013? The Puti...

On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to Detroit was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers and sixteen crew. Large sectio...