Books & Podcast
Conversations with the past
Sometimes the best way to learn from history is simply to ask the people who made it what on earth they thought they were doing.
That was the idea behind Letters to Dead People, written with my co-author Ivor Share.
Rather than writing conventional biographies, we decided to write directly to the dead.
The result is a collection of imaginary letters to some of history’s most fascinating characters: scientists and inventors, artists and explorers, politicians and monarchs, heroes, villains and assorted troublemakers.
Some deserve congratulating.
Others have rather more explaining to do.
Letters to Dead People
What would you say if you could write to the people who shaped history?
Letters to Dead People uses humour, curiosity and the considerable benefit of hindsight to revisit extraordinary lives and events.
The letters aren't intended simply to tell their stories. They ask questions, challenge reputations and occasionally point out consequences that their recipients never lived long enough to see.
Funny in places, serious in others, the underlying question is always much the same:
What can we learn from them?
Explore Letters to Dead People
More Letters to Dead People
Unfortunately for the dead, we weren't finished.
More Letters to Dead People continues the conversation with another collection of people from history whose achievements, mistakes, ideas and reputations seemed too interesting to leave alone.
Once again, the letters range widely across history, looking beyond what these people are famous for to ask what their lives might still have to tell us today.
Discover More Letters to Dead People
Listen to the podcast
The conversation doesn't end with the books.
The Letters to Dead People Podcast explores more of the people, events and ideas behind the letters, bringing history into a rather more conversational setting.
If you enjoy history but prefer it without the lecture theatre, this is probably for you.
What can we learn from them?
Letters to Dead People began as an entertaining way of approaching history, but writing the letters repeatedly raises a larger question.
People change the world without knowing what the consequences will be. New ideas collide with old institutions. Technologies solve one problem while creating several others. And human beings demonstrate a remarkable ability to repeat mistakes they could, in principle, have seen coming.
That question, what can we learn from history?, now sits at the heart of much of my writing.
It is also where Letters to Dead People connects with the wider ideas I explore here.
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