There's now more than 1,000 #ww1 YMCA locations on my world map! This week has seen a huge update of English sites as well as a handful on the Western Front. Check it out here:

Brisbane ANZAC memorial, this Remembrance Sunday

Excited to return to writing about history, with lots of new ideas up my sleeve. I'm currently in the process of migrating the old blog over to substack, so any insider tips are most welcome!

Coming soon ...

Per ardua ad astra - the view from my lunchtime run

Well worth picking up on Spotify audiobooks, where you can also pick and choose your chapters. The 100 Days chapter is worth it on its own.

Just finished reading Get In - a surprisingly interesting look behind the red curtain of Labour during Starmer’s rise to PM. Although it’s very much more a book about McSweeney’s rise to power (and Gray’s fall from it).

Photo YMCA stores in Alexandria, Egypt, during WW1. Cadbury Library: YMCA/4/1/1/C/17

I’m packing up some of my history things to move over to bluesky now there’s less interaction here on Twitter. Find me with the same username.

The ‘light’ holiday reading continues

So that’s my 2024 round-up! Please do recommend things you’d think I’d enjoy for 2025 as I get stuck into A Dictator Calls on the beach.

Finally the last novel of note is Yellowface. I loved this and it was a strikingly different plot for a novel. But mostly it stood out because, of all the books I read this year, I did not expect the YMCA during WW1 to pop up here.

But then there were the more fun novels: Meet You in the Middle is an enjoyable romance set between two DC staffers. Think Red, White and Royal Blue but more cutesy. Was great for a very long car ride. You are Here is a more gentle romance, which combines walking the

I also read two very emotional novels last year: Blue Sisters and Kairos. I know both of these are loved by many - and they were both very powerful - but I still can’t quite get behind sad novels. (Someone will invariably tell me this is because I read so much depressing

Then onto novels. I adored - and sped through on one camping trip - @Robert___Harris’s Precipice. A great, if fictionalised, insight into Asquith at the outbreak of WW1. Jesse Armstrong’s Love, Sex and other Foreign Policy Goals was a fab read, that hilariously captures a

I also read a few histories that tied into places I visited last year. Hitler and the Habsburgs by James Longo was an excellent study that balanced the story of Franz Ferdinand and his sons with Hitler’s murderous fascination with them. My first - and not my last - read on

It was also very powerful to read both East West Street and Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad last year. Two incredible reads on the harrowing history of Eastern Europeans under the regimes of Hitler and Stalin, both coinciding in the city of Lviv.

I think my standout book of the year was Beyond the Wall by @hoyer_kat, which was such a wonderfully thorough look at the history of East Germany. I followed this up later in the year with In Search of Berlin, another great read on the intense history of the German capital.

A few days into the new year, time for my annual reading round up! I read 38 books last year, slightly fewer than the year before but I did read a few longer histories.

National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, 1st December 1948.

‘Placing the Canadian Colours on Wolfe's Monument in Westminster Abbey’ by Emily Warren (1919)