My new wife and I settled into our new home in a country lane at Santa Úrsula on the island of Tenerife in 1980. In a small cottage…
Category: A History of Poland
Caustic Congresses II: the Treaty of Versailles
This treaty has been blamed by many historians as a more than indirect cause of the Second World War. It was supposed to be a treaty made between…
The Final Solution
Researchers have tried to find cogent reasons for Hitler’s pathological hatred of the Jews. Nothing in his childhood in Austria happened which might have sown the…
Great War Commanders: Hans von Seeckt: who?
I am not being frivolous. If you were to ask even German or Austrian nationals of below a certain age, say seventy, who Hans von Seeckt was, you…
Great War Commanders: Falkenhayn the honest Junker
Eric von Falkenhayn was born in 1861, scion of a typical ‘Junker’ family, which means ‘powerful, noble, landowning, and, not infrequently, bullying and proud as well’. At school…
Alexander I, Tsar of Russia
The future Tsar was born in 1777, a son of the supposedly mad Tsar Paul. Contemporary chroniclers have it that young Alexander was implicated in the murder of…