He was the last Chancellor of the Weimar Republic (q.v.), and a high-ranking general in the German army. Even while he was a young officer this Junker was…
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.
Prime Minister Lord Salisbury
Kind Hearts and Coronets is probably the best and blackest of the British 1950s comedies written for the screen. The film tells the story of an illegitimate boy…
The ‘Meiji’ Restoration & the Satsuna Rebellion
Meiji means enlightened rule, and this was shown throughout the reign of the Japanese Emperor Mitsuhito, ruling from 1868 to 1912. After the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate,…
The ‘White’ Terror
In my fifty years in education I have found little evidence of this historical peculiarity being taught in schools and universities. Teachers have even put on a blank…
The Daily Telegraph Affair
William II, Emperor of Germany (the Kaiser) came on a visit to England in 1908, and stayed for a while with Colonel Stuart-Wortley. After one of their conversations…
Count Cavour
Camilo Benso Cavour was born in 1810, a Piedmontese aristocrat whose name and mother language were French. It is interesting to note that both Cavour and Garibaldi (q.v.)…
‘Lecturas’ puts its foot in it again
This is a pinkish Spanish glossy magazine published with great success throughout Spain. It mostly deals with ‘celebrities’ whatever they are; it is not in my list of…
Curious Anglo-German Agreements
Why ‘curious’? Because the first was agreed between Britain and Germany only fourteen years before the outbreak of a world war, the first of its kind. And the…
‘The most terrible of all my battles’ Napoleon Bonaparte
Perhaps one of the least documented pitched battles of the Napoleonic Wars was fought on 7th September 1812. It was called Borodino and took place in Russia, some…
The battle of Caporetto
Not everybody realises that in the First World War Italy fought on the Allied side. In the second ‘war to end all wars’ Italians were persuaded by Mussolini…