Horatio Herbert Kitchener was born in 1850. At school in Switzerland he learned perfect French, and later went to Palestine where he picked up near-perfect Arabic. After military…
Category: Austrian history
Great War Commanders: Falkenhayn the honest Junker
Eric von Falkenhayn was born in 1861, scion of a typical ‘Junker’ family, which means ‘powerful, noble, landowning, and, not infrequently, bullying and proud as well’. At school…
The Continental System (Blockade)
When I was a schoolboy (the Punic Wars q.v.), Bonaparte’s genial idea was called ‘The Continental System’, a good name but implying a kind of applied plan to…
Alexander I, Tsar of Russia
The future Tsar was born in 1777, a son of the supposedly mad Tsar Paul. Contemporary chroniclers have it that young Alexander was implicated in the murder of…
The Vichy Government (Vichy France)
Three-fifths of France fell to Nazi Germany soon after World War II was declared, though the French army and navy were larger than those of the aggressive Germans….
What was that Eastern Question?
Turkey was known by the unfriendly sobriquet of ‘The Sick Man of Europe’ during most of the 19th century; the Eastern Question is a collective term for the…
What was ‘The Black Hand’?
Often appearing in early spy novels, such as the works of John Buchan, Dornford Yates and Somerset Maugham, the Black Hand was actually a Serbian secret society –…
A tangled skein: the War of the Spanish Succession
Not even Frodo trying desperately to cut his way out of Shelob the Spider’s thick cobwebs is like my trying to explain the War of the Spanish Succession….
The sad story of ‘Sissi’
The Emperor Franz-Josef of Austria and Hungary was one of the last really powerful heads of state in Europe who was not only a monarch but a statesman….
The House of Habsburg
I know that many people who should know better write the above name as Hapsburg. I am not among them, perhaps because I am a retired journalist, not…