‘Adiós Princesa’: a review of the book published in Spanish in 2013
I have carefully read this paperbook book of nearly 300 pages, written in Spanish. The name of the author on the front cover is David Rocasolano. He is a lawyer by profession, and if he [...]
The Thirty Years War
The death in battle of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden / lookandlearn.com The British were involved in this nasty episode, though only on the margins. All wars are horribly wasting, but this one could [...]
Reflections on Bosworth Field
Richard killing Tudor’s standard bearer at Bosworth Five hundred and twenty-eight years ago, almost to the day, the Wars of the Roses came to an end in beautiful countryside near the town of [...]
Lords Rampant: how the British nobility won’t lie down
Not very long ago Mr Blair and his henchmen decided that the Upper Chamber of Parliament, where matters of the day were discussed calmly instead of noisily and rudely, as in the Lower House, was [...]
Reginald Cardinal Pole
Reginald Pole / bbc.co.uk Pole is one of those ancient English surnames that appear in various forms throughout the history of the British Isles. Reginald, born 1500 rose rapidly from being an ordained [...]
The National Insurance Act
Herbert Asquith in 1908 / an.wikipedia.org Britain’s industrial revolution was in the eighteenth century, and followed into the nineteen and twentieth. She became super-powerful and rich, but apart from a handful of mine [...]
The Treaties of Paris (May 1814 & November 1815)
Treaty 1814 / ebay.com Just eighteen months separate two important agreements reached in the city of Paris. After the Allies (Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia) had at last defeated Napoleon, a pact was [...]
The Battle of Midway
Chester Nimitz / history.com May and June 1942 saw two tremendous conflicts on the high seas in which the opposing fleets did not actually see each other or exchange salvoes. They were aircraft-carrier-based [...]
Kurt von Schleicher
/ en.wikipedia.org He was the last Chancellor of the Weimar Republic (q.v.), and a high-ranking general in the German army. Even while he was a young officer this Junker was reading works by [...]
Prime Minister Lord Salisbury
Lord Salisbury / gatesofvienna.blogspot.com Kind Hearts and Coronets is probably the best and blackest of the British 1950s comedies written for the screen. The film tells the story of an illegitimate boy who [...]
The ‘Meiji’ Restoration & the Satsuna Rebellion
The young Emperor Mitsuhito / nndb.com Meiji means enlightened rule, and this was shown throughout the reign of the Japanese Emperor Mitsuhito, ruling from 1868 to 1912. After the fall of the Tokugawa [...]
The ‘White’ Terror
General Hoche, mostly responsible for putting down the White Terror /nndb.com In my fifty years in education I have found little evidence of this historical peculiarity being taught in schools and universities. Teachers [...]
The Daily Telegraph Affair
William II, Emperor of Germany (the Kaiser) came on a visit to England in 1908, and stayed for a while with Colonel Stuart-Wortley. After one of their conversations the latter wrote a letter/ article for [...]
Count Cavour
Count Camilo Cavour / nndb.com Camilo Benso Cavour was born in 1810, a Piedmontese aristocrat whose name and mother language were French. It is interesting to note that both Cavour and Garibaldi (q.v.) [...]
‘Lecturas’ puts its foot in it again
This is a pinkish Spanish glossy magazine published with great success throughout Spain. It mostly deals with ‘celebrities’ whatever they are; it is not in my list of great reads. In April of this year [...]
Curious Anglo-German Agreements
What Grand Fleets used to look like / en.wikipedia.org Why ‘curious’? Because the first was agreed between Britain and Germany only fourteen years before the outbreak of a world war, the first of [...]
‘The most terrible of all my battles’ Napoleon Bonaparte
/ datavizblog.com Perhaps one of the least documented pitched battles of the Napoleonic Wars was fought on 7th September 1812. It was called Borodino and took place in Russia, some 70 miles west [...]
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