Some notes on the 2000 TV series ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’ I have in my possession a box set of this production, the material contained in four DVD discs….
Category: French History
Who were the ‘Sans-Culottes’?
The fashion for both men and women to wear trousers ending at the knee, or just below it, has been with us for five years or more. Some…
(Thomas) Woodrow Wilson
The twenty-seventh President of the United States was born in 1856 in Virginia, son of a Presbyterian minister. The family were slave-owners. Thirty-four years later Woodrow was made…
Burke, politician, essayist & long-lasting influence
Edmund Burke was born in Dublin in 1729. Educated in this city, it was not long before he quit ‘the bogs of Ireland’ and moved to London, where…
Bonapartism
This is not merely a philosophy: it is a political movement, a system of governance, and a decided set of political principles. As a political movement it was…
Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Viscount Turenne
The name could hardly sound more French, and yet Henri was the grandson of William of Orange ‘The Silent’, which should make him at least a Netherlander. Henri’s…
War in Vietnam
It is now an independent socialist/communist state bordered to the east by the South China Sea, and to the west by Laos and Cambodia. Dominated by China for…
The Tudors
I do not refer to the hideous filmed television series of the same name, designed more as pornography for sexually deprived viewers than students of England’s history. I…
What was the ‘Risorgimento’?
The word means ‘resurgence’ but that will not mean much to students. It was a nineteenth century movement designed to unite Italy, which had not been united since…