Out now! Literary Review's June 2026 issue, featuring @petermoore on George Forster @writerperkins on the Balfour family @william_whyte on British dons Ian Thomson on the fall of the USSR John Mullan on Emily Brontë and much, much more: literaryreview.co.uk

Thomas Cochrane would like a word.

Big work underway on Endeavour! We’re beginning a major conservation project to replace the standing rigging - the 56mm shrouds that support each mast and spar, carrying all 28 sails under constant tension. This is highly specialised work, completed using centuries-old ropemaking and rigging techniques, and it will unfold over many months to keep Endeavour seaworthy for generations to come. Be part of this journey. Please donate today to help preserve this remarkable ship. sea.museum/en/support/donate Image: David Mandelberg for ANMM #Support #Endeavour #Ropemaking #rigging

On Monday, the Chilean Naval Mission in the UK laid a wreath at Cochrane’s tomb in @wabbey, marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of Admiral Lord Cochrane. The ceremony was led by the Rev. Dr James Hawkey, Canon of the Abbey & CN Sven Barckhahn, Head of the Naval Mission.

This is infuriating. If the allegations are shown to be true it really is the most shamefully mendacious behaviour. Both a fraud on the reading public and two fingers up to the rest of us n/f writers.

The novelist Patrick O'Brian died 25 years ago today. Very few writers are stylists and storytellers in equal measure, but I think O'Brian, with his Aubrey-Maturin series, is one. To mark the moment I recorded an interview with his stepson, Nikolai Tolstoy unseenhistories.com/tolstoy-…

I first researched the shipwreck of the Royal Charter when I was writing a book called The Weather Experiment a decade ago. It was one of the great disasters of the Victorian Age and I found the details just as haunting this time around. Here's a new piece on that old story.

436 yrs after they sailed up the Channel, the Spanish Armada (one of them at least) arrived in London yesterday. The Galeon Andalucia, a full size replica of a 17th c Spanish warship, will be docked at St Katherine Docks near Tower Bridge from Sept 24 - Oct 6 and you can visit

It's back to sea for me. Thomas Cochrane really did live the most astonishing of lives on a vast, global stage. Still a colossal figure in South America, everyone seems to have forgotten his story here in the UK. It's time, I think, to tell it again.

#bridgesThursday - a bit of mid-week calm watching the Whitby Swing Bridge (eng J Mitchell Moncreiff) opening & closing as it has been doing since 1909

On Samuel Johnson's (new style) birthday, a little piece on my favourite of his great Rambler essays — No. 2: 'The necessity and danger of looking into futurity' unseenhistories.com/samuel-j…

"Replica of James Cook's ship Endeavour up for sale" bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c724…

.@BeccaPalmer99 (@UCLHistory) reviews "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream, 1740-1776" (@PenguinBooks, 2023) by @petermoore tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.…

"The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope." — Samuel Johnson. @fsgbooks have published Life, Liberty, Happiness so elegantly and here it is, newly released in paperback, with Johnson, Franklin, Macaulay and Paine gazing out.

General Election commentary in the newspapers, 222 years ago.

Brilliant to see Travels Through Time in @AustBookReview courtesy of the great Iain McCalman. It's still on a break because I have far too much work to do, but I am very proud of what we achieved with it: almost 200 episodes and a few million downloads tttpodcast.com

For @unseenhistories I spoke with @petermoore about North Carolina's ghosts, Stone Tape Theory, the British Museum's architecture, exhibiting the dead & more. unseenhistories.com/ghosts-o…

Had the pleasure of explaining some local history to my boy this morning. Eighty years ago, on 15 May 1944, the Thunderclap Conference took place at the old St Paul's School, when Eisenhower presented secret plans for D-Day to the king, Churchill and all the top military leaders.