SEA LION PRESS

By Charles EP Murphy Jenny Sparks, electric spirit of the 20th century; Jack Hawksmoor, engineered to command cities; the Engineer,...

April's releases from Sea Lion Press may give you the heebie-jeebies, or get your adrenaline pumping, or warm and break your heart. The...

By Gary Oswald The Flag of the Sultanate of Oman There were eight European Empires involved in the Scramble. Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and the UK. The great losers of those 8 were the Ottoman Empire of Turkey who started the 19th century as the largest foreign power in the continent with nominal control from Morocco to Eritrea but saw its African departments grow more and more independent and eventually lost them to the other empires. By 1914, t

By Tom Anderson When a British traveller visits the United States for the first time, in my experience there is an almost comically...

We have been running counter-factual essays on this blog for over a year now. And we've had some really intelligent eloquent people...

By Gary Oswald Historical Romances, like all stories set in the past, have a variable level of historical accuracy. Some authors clearly...

By Alex Richards While the start of 1630 saw France funding the Swedes against the Emperor, and the Dutch against the Spanish, Richelieu...

By Gary Oswald Flag of the Congo Free State Leopold’s aim for his colony in Africa was to make money. His efforts in portraying himself as a humanitarian were always aimed towards collecting donations, or ‘loans’ which he had no intention of paying back, from Europeans and Americans and his actions within the colony were the purest type of wealth extraction. Resources were to be taken out and sold and no money was to be given to the Africans. Originally, this meant primarily

By Tom Anderson When we think about the major popcultural phenomena that have shaped our world and spawned countless imitators—or...

Until the end of April, buy any SLP book and get any cheaper or same-priced ebook free. Globally, lockdown and social distancing is going...

By Gary Oswald 1890 map of the Congo Free State from the Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol. 1 The history of Slavery in Africa is one going back thousands of years. In this it's much the same as every other continent. Slavery varied in both the details and in the prevalence across the world but most polities to ever exit have used slaves. In terms of those details, I don't ever want to imply any slavery wasn't evil but certainly slaves tortured and sacrificed in Vodun ceremonies w

By Charles EP Murphy Scream! was that increasingly rare thing, a new British comic made in the 1980s with no licensed property to hang...

By Gary Oswald Ideas are cheap. Most people can come up with a thousand concepts for books. The skill is in the execution. In bringing that vision into life, putting the idea into words. And yet there is still a value in a good concept. There are hundreds of well written, well executed books that hold no interest to me because the concept is one I don’t care for. The world’s best written story about the innate eroticism of painting walls is still unlikely to become a best sel

By Tom Anderson In the UK, and many other countries, anyone who has ever had to design timetables and schedules for major educational...

Sea Lion Press today announces three new books, available now. Eternal Caesars is a collection of essays exploring 'hard AH' takes on...

By Alex Richards The period of the Thirty Years war from the Peace of Prague to the Treaty of Westphalia is usually termed the French...

By Tom Anderson Mention ‘comics’ and, today, your first thought is quite likely to be of larger-than-life American superhero comic books....

By Andy Cooke Last time, I got up to the marathon trip of Gemini 7 – where Frank Borman and Jim Lovell (who would later be part of the...

By Charles EP Murphy Running from 1937 to 2012, DC Thomson’s The Dandy is still one of the longest-running comics on the Earth. For every...

By Gary Oswald Warning: This is an article about a Genocide and will be tough reading. As discussed at the end of the last article , the first blow to the good relations between the Herero and the Germans was the Rinderpest epizootic. Rinderpest is an infectious viral disease that arrived in Africa during the Italian Campaign in Somaliland because Cattle from India were bought in to supply the Italian troops. The infection spread like wildfire through cattle herds in Africa,