My life as a historian of the Great War

As the author of eight non-fiction books, I am most often asked why did I chose to write a particular title. The answer is that my books are usually written out of obsession: to slake my personal thirst for knowledge on the subject in question – almost irrespective of whether the topic would interest anyone else. Fortunately, most have.

I started early, writing my first title, The War Walk: A Journey Along the Western Front, when I was in my twenties. This, my most personal book, was a homage to my late father, Frank Jones, a very elderly dad who had been in his sixties when I was born. As such, he was a veteran of the first world war, but, like me, a myopic spectacle-wearer, he spent the conflict behind the lines in the châteaux where generals like Douglas Haig planned their bloody offensives. Dad’s task was to take down their battle orders in shorthand and then type them out.