Thousands of venerable, even ancient jokes lie festering in every corner of an English house. The language seems to connive with the typically British sense of humour. Every…
Category: Today
Spain: the King’s apology
Almost too much printer’s ink and telecaster’s saliva has already been spent on this subject. A few days ago Juan-Carlos I, a Spanish Borbón to his fingertips, left…
Dr. Arnold of Rugby (and his son Matthew)
Thomas Arnold is probably the most celebrated real (as opposed to invented) headmaster in history. He is the lynch-pin of a book called Tom Brown’s Schooldays written by…
G-H Sunday Philosophy: the sadness of Zapatero
I feel a degree of sympathy for the ex-President of the Government in Spain. What can he do on Sundays? His agnostic wife Sonsoles goes off to sing…
The Carolingian empire: what was it & the Caroline Islands: where are they?
University students and high school seniors always come across these two words ‘Carolingian’ and ‘Caroline’ – the latter in reference to some remote islands – not to Queen…
The Sun King
Louis the Fourteenth (XIV) was the King of France for seventy-two years, from 1643 to 1715. He is the great monarch who still startles lighter-minded history students by…
Another Voice: by Dean Swift
Yesterday March 25 regional elections took place in two autonomous communities in Spain – Andalucía and Asturias. The results were more or less what were expected, in that…
The fate of three great nautical ladies
Three enormous ocean liners, built well before the Second War when trans-Atlantic travel was best made by sea, not by air, suffered ends which none of them deserved….
A second message from Dean Swift
I am greatly indebted to Dr. M, an acquaintance, for using his eagle eye to spot a superfluous ‘of’’ in a line occurring in one of my posts….
What was the ‘Roman Question’?
It is something studious people have been asking for centuries: what relation does the city of Rome (for one thousand four hundred years in the ‘temporal’ possession of…