I talk Holy War, the Lionheart, the Crusades, and the clash of religions with Richard Lee of the Historical Novel Society: http://historicalnovelsociety.org/holy-war-the-conclusion-of-the-saladin-trilogy-launches-23rd-may-author-jack-hight-talks-the-lionheart-the-crusades-and-the-clash-of-religions/

First, some shameless self-promotion: Holy War is out on 23 May (order your copy now!). In this, the final volume of the Saladin Trilogy, Richard the Lionheart makes his long-awaited appearance in the Holy Land, where he does battle with the forces of Saladin. Richard provides great fodder for fiction, and writing his character was…

One of the more surreal aspects of being a writer is receiving fan mail (or fan email, to be more precise).  It’s not something I thought much about before I published my first novel.  I write because I love it.  I love digging into history and bringing the past to life.  I feel privileged –…

I love my Kindle, but one problem that I have with it is that it shrinks the maps in books to such a minuscule size that they are impossible to decipher.  So, for the Kindle readers out there, I am posting the map from EAGLE here.  Click on the small map below for a larger…

In Cairo, Coptic Christians recently ended a two-week sit-in, held to protest the rising sectarian violence in that country.  Since the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak, there have been attacks on churches, several of which have been closed, and street fights have erupted between Copts and Muslims.  The approximately eight million Egyptian Christians – out…

One of the most distinctive features of Islam is salat, the prayer ritual, which all Muslims are expected to perform five times each day.  Movies and news broadcasts have made us familiar with muezzins chanting the call to prayer from minarets and with Muslim worshipers kneeling and prostrating themselves as they pray.  But most of…

The images coming out of Japan in the wake of the devastating earthquake and tsunami are awful in both the modern and original senses of the word; they inspire both horror and a biblical, fire and brimstone sort of awe.  It is amazing how quickly disaster struck, rocking Tokyo, buckling roads, carrying cars away in…

When the United States brought down Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, George W. Bush hoped that a newly democratic Iraq might serve as a model for other Middle Eastern states. Of course, this did not stop the United States from continuing its strategic alliance with decidedly non-democratic regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. The…

John, one of the two main characters of Eagle, is an Englishman.  To be more precise, he is a Yorkshireman from the West Riding town of Tatewic (now known as Todwick).  He was born in 1132, sixty-six years after Battle of Hastings and the crowning of William as king of England, yet the Conquest cast…

In Siege, the emperor Constantine pushes through the Union of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, hoping to receive aid from the West.  However, his push for union only divides his people, inciting the Greek monk Gennadius to do whatever it takes to keep union from occurring. While the role of Gennadius is somewhat exaggerated in…