This is a fascinating piece for all creative writers, esp those working on historical stories. Joad R Wren created his own hand drawn (and superbly detailed) map of London in the 1660s while working on a novel set in those years. OxMstCW Dalton Mabery

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.

For Unseen Histories I spoke with Peter Moore about North Carolina's ghosts, Stone Tape Theory, the British Museum's architecture, exhibiting the dead & more. unseenhistories.com/ghosts-of-the-…

Brilliant to see Travels Through Time in Australian Book Review 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

General Election commentary in the newspapers, 222 years ago.

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

.Becca Palmer (UCL History) reviews "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream, 1740-1776" (Penguin Books, 2023) by Peter Moore tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

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

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-johnson…

#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

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.

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

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.

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-patric…

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.