This uprising, which started in 1850 and ended fourteen years later, was the greatest peasant rebellion in China in the 19th century. The 18th had seen a rise…
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.
The 12 basic verb English tenses (with examples)
Present: I work = I work hard all day Past: I worked = I worked hard all last year. Future: I will work = I will work hard…
1811: W.M. Thackeray is born
One year before the birth of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta. It was 1811, and William was the son of a prosperous official on…
1572: Ben Jonson is born
Jonson was born, a Londoner, a month after his father died, and nine years after the birth of Shakespeare. His mother re-married, to a bricklayer, for whom Ben…
1564: Shakespeare and Marlowe are born
If Christopher Marlowe had not been killed in a tavern brawl at the age of twenty-nine, he might have equalled his exact contemporary William Shakespeare as poet and…
Revolutionary Lajos Kossuth
One of the great Hungarian heroes, about whom much fact and fiction has been mixed, Kossuth was born in 1802. His family was poor but noble. He was…
US President Monroe & his Doctrine
James Monroe was born in Virginia in 1758, and became the 5th President of the United States. He did not shine as a diplomat but he did manage…
The wit of two conductors
It is possible that many players in orchestras have heard very funny comments made to them during rehearsal, or even during the actual performance of an orchestral piece….
The demise of the Church of England
A distinguished elderly gentleman on a professional foreign tour, lay on his hotel bed waiting for news of a cancelled flight. His press secretary found him there, hands…
Four Sforzas
It would be hard to think what the history of Italy would have been without the Sforza family. We have already studied the Visconti, the Medici, the Este…