This is more usually a first or Christian name, and sometimes encourages unfair laughter: “Come on Percy, show ‘em wot you got!” As a surname or family…
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.
Cinematic car chases
There are second-unit directors whose speciality is the car chase. These are usually urban, but the countryside has also seen some hair-raising examples. I have chosen two of…
The Home Guard (a.k.a.Dad’s Army)
Thanks to a BBC-made TV series stretching from the early Sixties to the late Seventies, a phenomenon from the Second War has become memorable. The series was…
The Hohenzollern family
Of all the great and influential German families, descending from the mists of time, always involved in something – providing kings, making a nuisance of themselves, being or…
Archers and Archery
An archer was a soldier, usually professional, armed with a bow and a quiver full of arrows. It would be difficult to estimate how long this lethal weapon…
The House of Guise
The name of a branch of the ducal house of Lorraine in France, it became prominent, if not menacing, during the 16th century. Claude de Lorraine was born…
Two Hawkins, father & son, both ‘pirates’
Sir John and Sir Richard Hawkins or Hawkyns would have preferred to be called seamen, or navigators, or simply sailors. That is how British history books describe them….
The Passive Voice & the use of the Double Negative
The passive voice is most popular with writers and speakers in the Anglo-Saxon world. It is rarely used in Latin countries. It is formed by inverting the subject…