by Mark Simmons | Aug 13, 2024 | Uncategorized
1 The 39 Steps John Buchan. I think it has to be on everybody’s list written by Buchan while he was ill in bed at the start of the First World War and published in 1915. It has great pace and a riveting plot no wonder the soldiers in the trenches were enthralled, and...
by Mark Simmons | Aug 12, 2024 | Uncategorized
In August 1909, a semi retired, Naval Commander aged fifty, and living on a houseboat near Southampton devising boom defences for rivers and harbours, received an odd written request. The letter was from Rear Admiral Bethell, Director of Naval Intelligence. It advised...
by Mark Simmons | Aug 8, 2024 | Uncategorized
The great American writer William Faulkner in his unique literary voice wrote of Pickett’s charge in his novel Intruder in the Dust and tells us the whole South wanted and still wants to be there at Gettysburg on the 3 July 1863: ‘…the brigades are in position...
by Mark Simmons | Jul 5, 2024 | Uncategorized
by Mark Simmons | Jun 7, 2024 | Uncategorized
D-Day Commando The Story of 48 Commando Royal Marines, on the 6th of June 1944. 48 Royal Marine Commando was the last such unit to be formed in World War Two, and the first to land on D-Day. Lance-Corporal Ted Brooks arrived on Nan Red Beach on the...
by Mark Simmons | May 8, 2024 | Uncategorized
