The Emperor Constantine (known as ‘the Great’)
The statue of Constantine before York Minster / york-united-kingdom.co.uk Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus was born around 274 AD. His was a patrician family in Rome and his father was Constantius I who died [...]
A law in urgent need of repeal: the Royal Marriages Act
The Houses of Parliament / gothereguide.com Yes I know that the majority of you don’t give a stuff about royalty anyway but quite a few nations prefer their Head of State to wear [...]
Margaret Thatcher, the ‘Iron Lady’
R.I.P. / guardian.co.uk Margaret Hilda Thatcher was born in 1925 in Lincolnshire, the daughter of the owner of a small grocer’s shop. She was a scholarship girl, brainy and hard-working, who [...]
Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish Play’ and bad luck
Jon Finch loses his head in Polanski’s film of Macbeth / alucine.es Macbeth is William Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, written between 1603 and 1607. The play contains many of the Bard’s most famous and [...]
General Strikes (in Britain)
An actual scene from the General Strike in Britain / bbc.co.uk I live in Spain where general strikes are called with stunning regularity by the chief trade unions. This has not been a [...]
The Final Solution
Researchers have tried to find cogent reasons for Hitler’s pathological hatred of the Jews. Nothing in his childhood in Austria happened which might have sown the seeds of that poisonous dislike growing in [...]
The hornet John Wilkes
The hornet himself at his desk / thetimes.co.uk It is difficult correctly to describe John Wilkes in an unprejudiced manner. Personally, he was a stranger to cleanliness, he was fearfully ugly, he had [...]
English section: Gobbledegook & Officialese
An onomatopoeic word is one that derives its meaning from the sound it makes. The accepted dictionary word ‘gobbledegook’ decidedly comes from the sound made by most poultry animals in the farmyard, especially turkeys. The [...]
The Virginius incident
Artist’s impression of the sinking of the Virginius / historyofcuba.com By the last quarter of the nineteenth century piracy and slavery/the slave trade were almost extinguished, partly because governments were not inclined, [...]
The beginnings of the Dominion of Canada
The original inhabitants of the Dominion – the Iroquois /cynthia swope.com Canada is the second largest country in the world, even if large masses of it are covered in ice. We all [...]
The (disastrous) Peace of Amiens
PM George Canning painted by R. Evans /es.wikipedia.org The months of February and March, 1802 encouraged a fairly peaceful interlude in the Napoleonic Wars between France and (principally) Britain. The British people [...]
From private soldier to King of Sweden: Bernadotte
Bernadotte the French Marshal who became King of Sweden / unofficialroyalty.com Born into a French middle-class family in 1763, Jean-Baptiste Jules Bernadotte got into the royal army as a private soldier in 1780 [...]
The battle of Austerlitz
Map of the Battle of Austerlitz Anyone living at the beginning of the nineteenth century might have thought that the battle of Trafalgar, fought in October 1805 would be enough to topple Napoleon Bonaparte [...]
Field-Marshal Radetzky
Radetzky von Radetz / en.wikipedia.org Josef Wenzel, Count of Radetz was born in Austria in 1766. He became a soldier aan fought the Turks at the age of twenty-two in one of [...]
The Roman emperor who died in Britain
Septimius Severus, died at York / heritagedaily.com A few of you clever bloggers will deny it, but it is a fair bet that nobody knew that a Roman emperor died in Britain. Everybody [...]
The Radical Republican Party (PPR) of Spain
Alexandro Lerroux (es.wikipedia.org Since they were given the chance to do so, the Spanish people have preferred to vote for left-inclined political parties. After the new Constitution of 1978, signed [...]
The US Supreme Court and homosexual marriage
Alexander, 3 state marriages and one lifetime lover he could not marry /alexanderhephaistion.com Just now the US Supreme Court is busy debating the rights and wrongs of legalizing in federal terms the [...]
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