The most atrocious epidemic of bubonic and pneumonic plague recorded, the Black Death started circa 1347 in Europe. The Tartar army, just arrived at the port of Caffa…
Category: Today
Switzerland: where Italians, Frenchmen & Germans don’t bother with nationalism
A half-dozen of the planet’s most important countries are now infected by the nationalist mosquito. Europe (after the Second War) invented a large country called Yugoslavia…
Quis? Who was this man?
Here you see an ancient photograph of a very 20th century man who was actually born in the 19th. Can you figure out who he is? Let…
What the English language owes to Shakespeare
English owes more than you know to William Shakespeare. Yes, that playwright from four hundred years ago now considered so unimportant by British educational authorities that not a…
Disasters waiting to happen: Nuffield
William Richard Morris Nuffield started off well, but ended as the man who almost singlehandedly destroyed the British car industry. I don’t suppose this was his intention,…
Gibraltar in the news again
President of the Spanish Government Mariano Rajoy spoke to the United Nations recently. He explained the country’s economic situation, which is disastrous, though no fault of his…
‘Emancipation’ of the Catholics
The Christian Church first came into Britain through the north of Ireland and Scotland, probably with St. Augustine. The Roman Catholic Church was soon established throughout Ireland,…
Arturo eyes Andalucía
Arturo Pérez-Reverte is one of the very best writers of modern Castilian prose, but then he is also more than capable of writing in the purest seventeenth century…
Rich in history: the Rothschilds
Whole books have been published about this world-famous banking family. Some of the authors have indulged in hagiography, others have been perhaps unconsciously anti-Semitic. The latter view is…
Marx, Lenin and the ‘lumpenproletariat’
These days they are the underclass, that vast army of uneducated, unemployable, often criminally inclined, very often obese, more than often drugged people of any age found in…