Jem Duducu – författare

Even while the frontiers of the Wild West were being fought over, its myth was being forged. Sometimes this was in the form of incredibly popular pulp novels, on others the likes of the hugely successful Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show that even toured Europe and delighted monarchs. By the turn of the 20th Century, just as the era was being consigned to history, motion pictures began telling these stories in a new medium. Some of the early films were supervised by the very legends of the old west the movie was about. The era of the western was born.Some of the most important films of the 20th century were westerns. Many of Hollywood’s brightest stars regularly played cowboys and for decades, the simple western was a guaranteed way to make money and fill a movie theatre.Like every art form, over the years the western evolved. At times it was as wholesome as apple pie. There were times when it redefined cinema in terms of scope and storytelling. In other decades it created great anxiety about levels of violence and moral nihilism. The genre has been used to entertain, reveal the plight of indigenous peoples, explore racism, sexism and even homophobia. There have been westerns that have been analogies for the perils of McCarthyism. A few have been heaped with awards and critical acclaim, others were reviled by critics (and sometimes even their own studio) only to go on and be massive box office successes. Lines, images and scores from westerns have seeped into pop culture.Today the western no longer dominates cinemas as it once did but they are still hugely popular. Once again they have evolved with the times, becoming hit video games or massively popular shows on TV or streaming services.

In the fifth century, Attila the Hun terrorised both the Eastern and Western Roman Empires; his were the first of the Devil’s horsemen. After his death his empire quickly disintegrated – but then came the Magyars, fighting the early Holy Roman Empire, and the heavy cavalry used to counter them is where the concept of the knight in armour comes from. Thirdly, there are the Turks, the only group that didn’t expand into Europe, but instead conquered the Middle East. Like the other groups, they were shamanistic pagans and yet within a generation they had converted to Islam.Fourthly, and most famously, we have the Mongol Empire, the largest land-based empire in history, spreading from Korea to Poland. It was hugely important for a century and its impact lasted for half a millennium. Finally, there is Tamerlane. Alexander the Great gets a lot of credit for fighting for eight years without a loss. Tamerlane fought for 25 without loss and he was paralysed down one side of his body. He would even vanquish two of the earlier groups, in wars against the Mongols and the Turkish Ottoman sultans.What links them all is the horse as a weapon of war. In his own attractive style – ‘as accessible as it is informative’ (Deus Vult) – Jem Duducu rides across a thousand years of conquest on horseback.

Discover the history behind the facts.The British Empire had a rich, varied and controversial history, commonly perceived to have spanned 500 years from the era of Columbus and his voyages of discovery to the aftermath of the Second World War. Many statements are made about this era that shaped our nation, but what are the stories behind these facts? Which are true and which are merely beliefs that have grown into fact? Jem Duducu takes us on a whirlwind tour of the Empire and its history, condensing the gigantic story into easy-to-read, bitesize sections. He examines some of the most important aspects of the Empire, from exploration and discovery in the era of Elizabeth I, to the Slave Trade, to the eventual decline after the Second World War.

Not all history is recorded in school textbooks or cast into towering monuments that shape city skylines. Quite often the most intriguing (and most bizarre) bits are forgotten and fall away into obscurity. In this fascinating book, Jem Duducu shines light on the almost forgotten, wonderfully strange, and often hilarious moments of history that would otherwise be lost forever.Forgotten History tells in delightful detail the stories of hard-to-believe events, people and inventions. Spanning the breadth of human history, this light-hearted and easy-to-read book is full to bursting with the bits from history that even a history enthusiast may otherwise have never known.Covering a wide variety of topics, from the time a Pope put his dead predecessor on trial to the awkward moment when the US Air Force accidentally dropped nuclear bombs on Spain, Forgotten History provides a journey through time to discover the weird and wonderful history that you didn’t learn about in school.

There is no shortage of Hollywood films about historical events, but what do the movies actually get right, and why do they get so much wrong?Hollywood loves a story: good guys versus bad guys, heroes winning the day, and the guy gets the girl. But we all know real life isn’t exactly like that, and this is even more true when we look at history. Rarely do the just prevail and the three-act story cannot exist over continents and decades of human interaction. So, when Hollywood decides to exploit history for profit, we end up with a wide array of films. Some are comedies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, others are little more than action films playing dress up like Gladiator, and many are Oscar contenders burdened with an enormous sense of self-importance. But very few are historically accurate. From Cleopatra to Da 5 Bloods, the reality is no matter what Hollywood’s intentions are, almost all historical films are an exaggeration or distortion of what really happened. Sometimes the alterations are for the sake of brevity, as watching a movie in real time about the Hundred Years War would literally kill you. Other additions may be out of necessity, since nobody thought to write down the everyday conversations between King Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, for The Other Boleyn Girl. And some projects twist the facts to suit a more sinister purpose.In Hollywood and History, Jem Duducu takes readers through thousands of years of global history as immortalized and ultimately fictionalized by Hollywood, exploring many facets of the representation of history in movies from the medieval times to the wild west and both World Wars. Along the way, readers will also better understand Hollywood’s own history, as it evolved from black and white silent shorts to the multiplex CGI epics of today. As studios and audiences have matured through the years, so too have their representations of history. Armies will clash, leaders will be slain, empires will fall, and a few historical inaccuracies will be pointed out along the way. A must-read for film and history fans alike.