Should you be touring Britain and find yourself in Gloucestershire, you might want to sleep and eat in a genuine Tudor castle at Thornbury, though it is only…
Author: Dean Swift
‘Dean Swift’ is a pen name: the author has been a soldier; he has worked in sales, TV, the making of films, as a teacher of English and history and a journalist. He is married with three grown-up children. They live in Spain.
Abdication of the Spanish King
Don Juan Carlos was destined by General Franco to become Juan Carlos I, King of Spain, moving aside for political reasons his father, the Count of Barcelona, son…
Bonapartism & Doubts about Napoleon III
‘Bonapartism’ was three things put under one invented name: a political movement, a system of government, and a boxed set of political principles. It supported the descendents of…
What was the CNT?
The Confederación Nacional de Trabajo was a Spanish labour/syndicalist movement, heavily involved in the Civil War of 1936/1939. The arrival of this trade union movement in 1911 helped…
The Czechoslovakian Crisis
Many years before The Czech Republic and Slovakia freed themselves from the yoke of being simply Czechoslovakia, this crisis evolved from territorial demands made by Adolf Hitler. One…
Jan Christian Smuts
The South African soldier, hero and future Prime Minister was born in the Cape Colony in 1870. No-one was more in the centre of South African politics during…
The German Revolution
This was not a socialist revolution, as in Russia and France; nor was it anti-colonial, as it was in North America. It began just one month before the…
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
Perversely enough, it was one of the great film comedies that contained a set piece showing with alarming exactitude what happened in Chicago in 1929. The film is…
Gleichschaltung (coordination by putting in the same gear)
This dubious process began in Germany in February 1933, when civil liberties were suppressed. The newly established Hitler dictatorship meant to rid itself of all independent institutions. In…
Giuseppe Mazzini
Giuseppe Mazzini was an Italian revolutionary, born in Genoa, a son of a medical doctor whose radical views were impressed on Giuseppe as a boy. He was born…