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I went today to the 71st anniversary memorial service for the victims of the Bethnal Green Tube shelter disaster, which I wrote about in my new book ‘Steaming to Victory: How Britain’s railways won the war’. It was the worst single disaster in Britain during WW2. (The picture here shows the Pearly Kings and Queens […]

  Just read a brilliant book called The Invention of News by the historian Andrew Pettegree. Heartened to see another book saying that quality news can survive – a point we made in our own book The Future of Quality News Journalism, published by Routledge last autumn. Here’s an extract from my chapter about the […]

In the new edition of Steaming to Victory, out on March 27, I had to make some cuts to accommodate new facts that had come to light since it was first published last year. It was tough to know what to trim, and sadly I had to lose the following tribute to the British Library […]

    Very pleased that the new  edition of my book  ‘Steaming to Victory: How Britain’s railways won the war’ is to be published on March 27  by Arrow Books. It’s specially updated for the D-Day anniversary this June. The Sunday Express called it: ‘Gripping as a fictional thriller’. The BBC said: ‘An elegant evocation […]

Here’s me, asking the question of Labour’s Shadow Transport Secretary Lilian Greenwood at the Derbyshire Rail Forum on the terrace of the House of Commons last night

The terrible weather has cut the old Great Western line to Cornwall at the Dawlish sea wall. So vulnerable always! What a tragedy that Beeching axed the old Southern Railway route  round Dartmoor to the north. I argued this in the Independent newspaper recently and it will be a centrepiece of a chapter in my […]

Delighted with the cover of the new revised edition of my book ‘Steaming to Victory: How Britain’s railways won the war’. It’s out from Arrow Books in March in time for the anniversary of D-Day, when the Queen will be travelling to the Normandy beaches to mark the 70th anniversary of this most historic day […]