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I have spent a long time living with 20th century European history — reading it, arguing about it, and thinking about what it actually felt like to be alive in Europe across that extraordinary hundred years. History has been a constant companion, but so has music: the harder, stranger edges of rock and progressive sounds that emerged from Europe in the 1960s and 70s are a particular passion, and the connection between what a society is going through and what it reaches for in its music is something I find endlessly fascinating. Cooking is the third thread — for me, food has always been the place where history becomes something you can touch and taste rather than simply read about. The European Century is the place where all three of those things finally get to talk to each other. I have been photographing European cities since the early 1990s, and some of those photographs — of London and Paris as they were before digital changed everything — appear on these pages. This site is written for people who want more from history than dates and battles. If that sounds like you, I think you will feel at home here.

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