Khutulun: How a warrior princess chose her husband

Genghis Khan was one of the bloodiest warrior generals in history. In the thirteenth century, his armies stormed out of the Asian steppe leaving a bloody smear across the map from Bokhara to Baghdad, the Black Sea to Buda-Pesth. He built an empire that dwarfed that of the Romans and the Abbasid Caliphate. He also […]

Why I wrote FURY

‘There’s been fighting over the Middle East for thousands of years. It will never end.’ At the time that I heard someone say this, I didn’t know much about Middle East politics. But it intrigued me, so I did some research. The Holy Land has been anything but holy. According to the Christian Bible, it […]

What happened to the Lost Legion of Carrhae?

In 1955, an Oxford University professor called Homer Hasenpflug Dubs published an astounding theory. He claimed to have found a town in China where Roman legionaries had lived fifty years before the birth of Christ. As evidence, he said he had unearthed two-thousand-year-old Roman pottery and pointed out the fact that many of the local […]

Conversos and the Spanish Inquisition

For centuries, Jews functioned as courtiers, government officials, merchants and moneylenders in Christian Spain. The Jewish community was useful to the ruling classes, and to an extent, protected by them. The middle years of the Reconquista coincided with a phase of economic expansion, in which both Jews and Christians contributed to the general prosperity and […]

Who was the real John Blackthorne in Shogun?

The recent hit TV series, Shogun, is based on the eponymous novel by James Clavell. Its main character is a British explorer called John Blackthorne. Was there really such a man? In fact, yes. Shogun’s Blackthorne is based on the real-life navigator William Adams, the first Englishman to ever set foot in Japan. Adams was […]