There is little that has survived today from my schoolday brushes with History teachers. .Mr Dudley tried to help me remember Napoleon’s different battle tactics. The ‘manoeuvre on the central position’ sticks with me, whether right or not. I enjoyed drawing the Code of Hammurabi tablet, and possibly an Assyrian war chariot, but otherwise, history just seemed to be “one damned thing after another”. My favourite date used to be 1485, remembered as the Battle of Bosworth Field.

The best history book when I was growing up was “1066 and all that”, particularly useful for English history.

Oddly the only real history that stuck was in the fictional work of William Goldman who wrote the screenplay for “Marathon Man”. In the book of the film he pointed out that Custer’s defeat by the neolithic bows and arrows of the Indians was in the same year as the first telephone call. To me it wasn’t really ancient history, Errol Flynn had only recently been Custer in full modern Technicolour.

I saw this as a marker for the time that the world became modern though the old world was still fighting back. I started looking in more detail at what was happening around the world, and making notes, and eventually a diary of the year in which to hold them. In 1876: Bananas & Custer looks at that year around the world. Was it a pivotal tipping point?

The next accident was trying to understand the reason for the Great Sioux War, where Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his troops were soundly defeated. The threads kept leading back to the natural starting point of the end of the American Civil War. I really enjoyed looking at the events in the gap between the unpleasantness between the States and the Battle of the Little Big Horn. There will be something new there for everyone.

In my other life I own and run a board game café in southwest London, UK. If you want to come along it’s called The Library Pot. It’s best to book a table if you want to come along. We have the game “The Battle of the Little Big Horn” and 850 others. It is also where I keep my 19th century newspapers, I have several years’ worth of the London Illustrated News, some Harper’s Weekly and one The Graphic from 1876.