The real Macbeth
The Scottish island of Iona, where the real Macbeth is buried / southernhebrides.com Macbeth is the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays and probably the work most associated with that playwright’s well-known sense of imagery. [...]
Child Stars & what happened to some of them
River Phoenix was one of the really tragic child stars /cainepatas.com Since cinema started small children with the talent (and courage) to act in front of a camera team have been popular with [...]
Christmas Message from ‘Dean Swift’
Statistics tell us we seem to have the good fortune to be read by a respectable number of thousands of history students every month. We say Happy and Merry Christmas and the Best of new [...]
General Templer & the Malayan Emergency
Sir Gerald Templer / sahr.co.uk Gerald Templer, a boy destined for military honours if ever there was one, was born in 1898. After joining up as a boy soldier he rose rapidly through [...]
The sea battle of Trafalgar
Artist’s impression of part of the Battle of Trafalgar / britishbattles.com There is a running fight, not unlike the battle of Trafalgar itself, between Spanish, British and French historians, which has continued without [...]
Special Note to followers of General-History
From today we shall take a short break, for travel, research and the Christmas holidays. Apart from the occasional Humour or ‘Quis?’ posts which will appear during the break, G-H has 44 Categories, including historical [...]
Humour on Tuesday
Here is a little story that some might find a bit racist, but these jokes are or are not racist according to one’s nationality. I like this joke for its subtlety: […]
Historians Polybius, Sallust, Seneca, Suetonius & Tacitus
POLYBIUS (204 – 122 BC) had the good luck (from the intellectual point of view) to be a historian during the rise of Rome after the 2nd Punic War. He was a Greek of noble [...]
The end of the British Empire and imperialism
It is barely seventy-two years since a quarter of the human race lived, toiled, danced and finally died under the Union Jack. It is a very short time in terms of the history of [...]
Reginald Pole (easy dates 1500 – 1558)
Reginald Pole / blogdelpadrefortea.blogspot.com Please note that this important character from history had the plain surname of Pole. His name is not De la Pole – quite a different family*. Our subject became [...]
Frederick (the Great) of Prussia
He was born in 1740, the son of Frederick William I and his queen, Sophia Dorothea, a daughter of George I of Great Britain. As a boy he was bullied by his father, who thought [...]
The Pizarro brothers and Perú
Gonzalo, another Pizarro brother / year8ttincas.wikispaces.com Francisco Pizarro was born in 1475 in Extremadura in western Spain, when that country was even more powerful than France. He became a conquistador and an important [...]
Two Dukes of Burgundy: Philip the Bold & Philip the Good
Our first Duke of Burgundy was born in 1342, a son of John ‘the Good’. There were so many dukes of this region of France that the theory that each earned a nickname because it [...]
The Pony Express
Pony Express: right across the United States / articles.latimes.com Though it lasted only two romantic and dangerous years, the Pony Express lived up to its name. It was horse-borne mail delivery, operated by [...]
Georgia (West Asia) & Georgia (USA)
Asian Georgia is separated from Russia by the Caucasus Mountains. It has a coast on the Black Sea, shares a border with Turkey to the west, and has boundaries with Azerbaijan and Armenia to the [...]
A (politically correct) state of affairs
Government, politics, wars and spying are subjects in which evasion and deceit are common and vulgar; hypocrisy is paramount and prudery prominent. The survival of politicians in politics in a democracy or for that matter [...]
The twelve basic tenses in English (British or American)
Present: I work = I work hard all day Past: I worked = I worked hard all last year. Future: I will work = I will work hard after I have finished my [...]
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