Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus was born around 274 AD. His was a patrician family in Rome and his father was Constantius I who died in the year 306,…
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.
A law in urgent need of repeal: the Royal Marriages Act
Yes I know that the majority of you don’t give a stuff about royalty anyway but quite a few nations prefer their Head of State to wear a…
Margaret Thatcher, the ‘Iron Lady’
Margaret Hilda Thatcher was born in 1925 in Lincolnshire, the daughter of the owner of a small grocer’s shop. She was a scholarship girl, brainy and…
Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish Play’ and bad luck
Macbeth is William Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, written between 1603 and 1607. The play contains many of the Bard’s most famous and usually ill-quoted lines, such as “Bubble, bubble”…
General Strikes (in Britain)
I live in Spain where general strikes are called with stunning regularity by the chief trade unions. This has not been a good move for the unions, because…
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…
The hornet John Wilkes
It is difficult correctly to describe John Wilkes in an unprejudiced manner. Personally, he was a stranger to cleanliness, he was fearfully ugly, he had a scurrilous and…
English section: Gobbledegook & Officialese
An onomatopoeic word is one that derives its meaning from the sound it makes. The accepted dictionary word ‘gobbledegook’ decidedly comes from the sound made by most poultry…
The Virginius incident
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century piracy and slavery/the slave trade were almost extinguished, partly because governments were not inclined, as they had before, to…
The beginnings of the Dominion of Canada
Canada is the second largest country in the world, even if large masses of it are covered in ice. We all know that the cultivated or potentially…