Lost History: Extraordinary stories that were left behind and why they matter: the new book from the bestselling author of Fake History

A wildly entertaining journey through the extraordinary stories that have slipped through the cracks of history. We think we know our history. The great battles, the remarkable discoveries, the people and events that shaped our world. But what if the history we remember is only a tiny fraction of what actually happened? And what about our own histories, the lives and stories of those who came before us? When his mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s leads Otto English to sift through generation family possessions, he uncovers an archive of forgotten stories – including that of a great-uncle who died at the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, aged just eighteen, and whose very existence had all but vanished from family memory. It got Otto thinking: if someone so close in time could be forgotten, what else might we have lost? And if so much can be forgotten within our own families, what happens when it comes to the history of entire nations – and those who decide which stories are remembered and which are left behind? Why do we remember the Spanish Armada but not England’s equally disastrous counterattack? How did American soldiers end up fighting alongside German troops in the final days of the Second World War? And why did the US government once consider dropping a nuclear bomb on the moon? In Lost History, English takes us on a wildly entertaining journey through the extraordinary stories that have slipped through the cracks of history. From forgotten wars and lost civilisations to overlooked inventions and extraordinary acts of human folly, he uncovers a past far stranger, richer and more surprising than the one we think we know. Some histories are deliberately erased, others quietly overlooked, and many simply lost to the passage of time. But whether it’s the history of a nation or the memories of a single family, what survives is only ever a fraction of the whole. Witty, illuminating, and deeply human, Lost History explores how we remember, why we forget, and what the stories we’ve lost reveal about ourselves and the world we live in.