Category: News

Don’t trust anyone who says ‘synergy and leverage’

There are any number of truly awful examples of ‘management speak’ driving people crazy in business these days, but there are two that I find particularly egregious. They are of course, synergy and leverage. Synergy is a medical term that describes “the combined effect of drugs, organs, etc that exceeds the sum of their individual effects” […]

Joe Dean enlistment

The real Joe Dean

The hero of ‘Blood and Blitzkrieg’ is named after my grandfather, who volunteered for the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in 1916 and made it to France just in time to go into action at the Battle of Messines in June 1917, where the Australian tunnellers blew up Hill 60 with 450 tonnes of explosives. The […]

My top 10 military fiction books

1. The Happy Return, CS Forester Forester manages to convey more about a character in fewer words than just about any other writer I know. This book is a brilliant example, and brings to life one of the best-known yet most elusive characters of this genre: Horatio Hornblower, a man tormented by duty. 2. HMS Surprise, Patrick, […]

A sequel?

I’m now partway into the sequel to ‘Blood and Blitzkrieg’. The story is set mostly in Occupied France, and I realised when I started writing it that I knew very little about what actually went on France during the war. Nothing like telling a story to expose your lack of knowledge! The whole Vichy thing […]

Felicitations

It’s only taken six or so years but I’ve finally got a book out (‘Blood and Blitzkrieg’ in case you missed it) and a website up to let people know it exists (oh, you’re here already). I’ll be blogging more about how the book came into being and so on in due course, but in […]