About

Hello.

I am a writer and translator, amongst other interests, and I lived and worked in Germany for twenty years as a TV producer/director and scriptwriter on WWI, WWII and other historical documentaries. I wrote, narrated, and composed the music for the six-part Hitler’s War TV series and I’ve also written many biographies on cultural icons such as Queen, Sir Alex Ferguson and Alexander McQueen or rock gods the Rolling Stones and 70s idol Joni Mitchell.
My interest in the WWI biographies was piqued when I was asked to translate books about WW2. I subsequently finished translating the first two books on WWI for my own interest, and I decided to turn them into e-Books. Now, the – expanded – collection is also available in paperback editions. I’ve gathered some into three six-part series: ‘Brothers and Comrades’,  ‘Dying for the Kaiser’ and ‘In the trenches of WWI’.

I hope you enjoy browsing the site. These voices from the past, historical documents from eye witnesses, are for me of enormous worth. If they are for you, too, then I have achieved a small amount in the service of historical awareness, and I’m glad about that. I was certainly absorbed in translating the books.
Historical awareness has always been a strong element in my life; with Irish parents it could hardly have been otherwise. When I lived in Ireland in later years, I was confronted with the past in both fireside tales and harsh reality.
Then I was surrounded by ‘living history’ when I lived and worked in Germany for twenty years as a TV producer/director and scriptwriter on WWI, WWII and other historical documentaries. Many of the programmes I assisted onto the screen have been shown worldwide on a variety of TV channels such as the Discovery Channel and the History Channel.
I was in Germany, too, when the Berlin Wall came down on that extraordinary night of November 9/10th 1989; an unforgettable moment of lightning, priceless for anyone with even a remote interest in the past. What a strange quirk of historical parallelism that ‘Crystal Night’ (Kristallnacht) in Germany, should have taken place on the 9/10th of November 1938, just over 50 years before. The future of history is unpredictable.