These hard workers guarded cattle and sheep, sometimes horses on the Great Plains of the United States. The work was arduous and the pay little. Cowboys originated in…
Category: History of the Cinema
The Krupp family: influences
The family was based in the industrial Ruhr, in Essen. Their business was founded in a small way, in 1811, and was unable to expand in any significant…
Laurence of Arabia (article revised 2012)
Thomas Edward Laurence was born in 1888, the son of Thomas Chapman, a member of a distinguished Anglo-Irish family. Thomas had eloped with his daughter’s governess, and settled…
The Fall of France: “for you, the war (of 42 days) is over!”
For many, if not all, of our seasoned history-lovers, the fact that the Second World War might have been over by the middle of 1940 is unknown. But…
Virginia & the Virginia Campaigns
At one time a British colony, Virginia is a state in North America that consists of ‘tide-water’ land in the central-Atlantic coastal plain of the United States of…
Bond films that weren’t, thanks to Harry
We’ve been having a bit of a Michael Caine season recently. We’ve seen the masterpiece Sleuth, the original of course, with old Sir Laurence pitted against young Mr….
How much truth is there in fiction?
The shortest, and probably the most effective piece of drama Shakespeare wrote was Macbeth. Even the least educated among us will quote from this play, perhaps without knowing…
The origin of legends
‘Legend has it . . .’ and most of Man’s legends are thousands of years old. The Dragon, for instance, has been around for centuries, in art and…
History of the Cinema: the first ‘Casino Royale’
During the 1960s, determined producers Charlie Feldman and Jerry Bresler set out on a saga that left even Hollywood astonished. They wanted to film the first of the…
Julius Caesar & the Caesars
Gaius Julius Caesar was a successful general and apparently reluctant dictator. He was born into a patrician family around 100 BC and became Pontifex Maximus (a species of…