BBC Radio 5 Live ‘Queen’s Diamond Jubilee’ 05.06.2012

Shelagh Fogarty   In the summer of 1979 while holidaying in Ireland, the Queen’s cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten died when an IRA bomb exploded on his boat. Well that explosion claimed the lives of four people including the Earl’s 14 year old grandson, Nicholas Knatchbull. Nicky’s twin brother Timothy Knatchbull survived but in his words he’d […]


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RTE 2fm ‘The Tubridy Show’ 02.09.2012

Ryan Tubridy   Here’s a quote, ‘We all have a car crash in our lives and to date I have had one; it happened to be a bomb. I was a boy at the time on a small boat in Ireland. Three of my family and a friend died in the explosion. One of the dead […]


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BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ 27.08.2009

Justin Webb    It is 30 years since an IRA bomb killed Lord Mountbatten. The bomb was placed in a boat. Also in that boat was Timothy Knatchbull, Lord Mountbatten’s grandson. He survived though his twin brother, his grandmother and a local teenager did not. Timothy Knatchbull now in his forties has written a book […]


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BBC Radio Four ‘Midweek’ 30.09.2009

Libby Purves Tim Knatchbull and his family have needed every ounce of determination to live. It’s thirty years since he was blown up on the fishing boat off Ireland in the IRA atrocity which killed Earl Mountbatten, his grandfather, his grandmother Lady Brabourne and the young Irish boat boy, Paul Maxwell and most savage of […]


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BBC Radio Kent 04.09.2009

PART ONE   Dominic Kent   He had an idyllic childhood in Kent, growing up in Mersham near Ashford. But in 1979 at the age of fourteen, Timothy Knatchbull’s world was shattered when he took a boat trip off the coast of Ireland. The Provisional IRA blew up the vessel assassinating his grandfather, Lord Mountbatten of […]


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BBC World Service ‘World Update’ 27.08.2009

Timothy Knatchbull   Well it was an absolutely beautiful day; gin clear, no wind, a mild, flat calm sea. You couldn’t want a more beautiful morning to go out on a family boat trip which is what we did.   My grandfather who was then seventy nine and my grandmother who was eighty three – that’s my […]


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Extracts of ‘From a Clear Blue Sky’

‘Twins’               The heart of a human foetus starts to beat three weeks after conception. Mine started beating in the middle of March 1964. A few millimeters away another heart was beating alongside mine. It belonged to my identical twin. Our hearts beat in loose synchronicity over seven hundred million times until he was killed, […]


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Prologue to ‘From a Clear Blue Sky’

            On the morning of Monday 27 August 1979, Paul Maxwell asked me the time. He laughed when I told him it was eleven thirty-nine and forty seconds. We were as carefree as skylarks, out together in my grandfather’s small fishing boat off County Sligo on the west coast of Ireland. My identical twin brother Nicholas […]


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  • 'It is one of the most intensely moving stories I have ever read, and I was gripped from the first page.'

    Barbara Taylor Bradford


    'Testament to a remarkable, benevolent soul...With this public love letter he has found a way to say goodbye’. Sunday Times


    ‘It is one of the most penetrating and humane books to have emerged from the Troubles.’

    Irish Independent


    'This amazingly clear-headed and mature book...Intelligent, honest, tender and so moving that it should come with a warning to read this in private because you're going to be in a tear-stained mess.’ Daily Mail


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