Historians turning their hand to fiction are all the rage at the moment: Simon Sebag Montefiore, Alison Weir and Harry Sidebottom, to name but three. But if I hadn’t changed agents in 2004 I might not have joined their ranks, because when I showed my previous agent a couple of draft chapters of a historical novel in 1998, his response was, ‘Don’t give up the day job.’ I didn’t.

Until, that is, I met the late George Macdonald Fraser, the creator of the Flasman novels, in 2006. Fraser was a literary hero of mine, and had often hinted in books that he would set one during the Zulu War of 1879. But when I asked him if that was still on the cards, he said no. Six months later I pitched just such an idea to Hodder and Zulu Hart, published last year and the first in the series of novels set in the late Victorian period, was the result.

The origins of my book “Berlin at War” go back to 2005, when I was looking for a new project after delivering “Killing Hitler” to the publisher. Over one of our lunches, where we were discussing possibilities, my agent suggested – in a more or less throwaway comment – that I ‘write something about Berlin’.

Over the next days and weeks, an idea began to take shape in my mind. I could see precisely where he was coming from. Berlin is the absolute cockpit, the focal point, of modern European history and – as anyone who has been there will testify – exerts a fascination on many of its visitors. The Third Reich, too, is an ever-green topic for historians and publishers alike – revisited and reanalysed over and over again. Maybe I could find a way of combining the two?

Oxford Don and author of the "Warrior of Rome" series of novels, Harry Sidebottom recently took the time out from promoting the latest novel, "Lion Of The Sun", to tell us more about the novel.

I first came across Eglantyne when I was working as a fundraiser at Save the Children. Having a nosy root around the organisation's archive one day I found a terrible leaflet, crumpled down the side of a plastic crate, showing a photograph of a starving Austrian child that Eglantyne had published without the consent of the British government censors at the end of the First World War. In the top right-hand corner the word 'suppressed!' was penciled in Eglantyne's unmistakable scratchy writing. The exclamation mark expressed her personal outrage at the Liberal government's policy to continue the economic blockade of Europe after the armistice - as a way of pushing through harsh peace terms with the defeated countries. The result of this policy was widespread starvation across Austria and Germany.