#348. Historical Lessons with Echoes Today: ’The House of War’ by Lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall

Simon Mayall was commissioned into the British Army in 1979, having graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. Over the following decades, he served in Germany, Belgium, the UK, and Oman, and he was deployed on operations in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, the Balkans, and the Middle East.

He commanded soldiers at all levels and held a series of increasingly senior staff appointments in the Ministry of Defence, including Assistant Chief of the General Staff, Deputy Chief of Defence Staff (Operations), and Defence Senior Adviser Middle East. Between Command and Staff training periods, he undertook a Defence Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and an MA in International Relations at King’s College. He was knighted in 2014 and retired from the Army in 2015.

Since retirement, Mayall has sought to combine his academic enthusiasm for history with his personal and professional experience in the Middle East to develop an experience in this complex and volatile region. As a result, he is regularly called upon for commentary or analysis, using his deep knowledge of history and religion to help listeners and readers better understand current events in the wider Middle East.

In 2020, he published a book, ‘Soldier in the Sand, a Personal History of the Modern Middle East’, which used a three-generational biography of his family to tell the story of the Middle East since the end of World War One. In 2024, he published ‘The House of War, the Struggle between Christendom and the Caliphate’, which examined the 1,300-year confrontation between the Christian and Islamic world through ten great sieges and battles, stretching from the Crusades and earlier to the collapse of the OWoman Empire in 1918.

This book is a prequel to Soldier in the Sand in many ways. Mayall hopes that as ‘Applied History’, it will both interest and educate readers and, once again, give them valuable insights into contemporary events. The original proposal was written with a television series in mind, and Mayall still hopes this epic set of stories, set within a grand, sweeping historical narrative, will make it onto the small screen.

He is planning to write a biography of Field Marshal Sir Nigel Bagnall, who he worked for as ADC and who is viewed as one of the most significant reformers of the British Army in modern times.

Mayall has now contributed twice to the Inspiring Leadership podcast. In his first appearance, his ‘top tip’ for leadership focused on purpose, professionalism in execution, and clarity of communication. For ‘respectable’ historians, in this current era of ‘battling narratives,’ he believes in the critical importance of facts, context, and ‘empathy’.

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