Canada is the second largest country in the world, even if large masses of it are covered in ice. We all know that the cultivated or potentially…
Category: Today
From private soldier to King of Sweden: Bernadotte
Born into a French middle-class family in 1763, Jean-Baptiste Jules Bernadotte got into the royal army as a private soldier in 1780 when he was seventeen; as he…
The US Supreme Court and homosexual marriage
Just now the US Supreme Court is busy debating the rights and wrongs of legalizing in federal terms the joining together in sacred or civil marriage of…
Popular Myths and the Conspiracy Theory: ‘the stab in the back’ 1918
Learnéd, and sometime not so learnéd people have started myths right down through the centuries almost since the human race was ‘uncivilized’. King Alfred ‘burning the cakes’,…
A brief history of spectator sports
Most (but not all) of the sports which are super-popular with the public today were invented, improved and regulated in the independent private schools of Victorian Britain;…
John of Gaunt
The man who would be king – though not of England John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster was a son of an English king. He was the father…
The time when there were THREE Popes
At this very moment the cardinals gathered in the Vatican are arguing about who shall be the next Pope, following Benedict XVI’s resignation on grounds of health….
The first European Community (failed)
The EEC as we know it today bears no resemblance to this first attempt, but at least enough initiative was shown by its inventors to make it last…
Saturday Spoofs; early April Fool’s Day biographies
Pilloch, N.G., Baron Pilloch of Bedwetty was born one day during the Second World War. He became a Socialist after losing his temper with a nanny who possesed…
Sturdy Beggars
In the so-called ‘developed’ societies since the end of the Second World War many children are brought up by unthinking parents to believe that work is something…