The Queen of Spain, and Gibraltar
Word has it that Sophia, Queen of Spain and sister to the exiled King of Greece, has been advised not to go to London to join the British royal family in celebrating Elizabeth II’s sixty [...]
Montenegro: beauty and independence
This place of almost unequalled beauty used to be the smallest of the constituent republics of the former Yugoslavia. It borders on Serbia in the north/east, Abania to the south, and Bosnia-Herzegovina to the north/west. [...]
The Luck of the Byngs, father and son
This sketch of the Admiral’s execution appeared in The London Magazine / George Byng, Viscount Torrington was born in 1663. After school education he headed straight for the Royal Navy to make his [...]
The ‘Indignants’ and Anarchy: what it is all about
We see on the daily news programmes that ‘Los Indignados’ have returned to the Puerta del Sol and the Plaza de Cataluña in Spain, and various other municipal hot points in Europe, to celebrate an [...]
Ian Fleming & the Count’s Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang
The good Count Z. in the original Chitty / commons.wikimedia.org The suave inventor of James Bond had already suffered a heart attack at the age of 52 when he began writing about a [...]
The Cabinet System
Many students are accustomed to using the terms Prime Minister and The Cabinet and even The Cabinet Rooms in their studies and essays, but do not know much more about what these words represent. The [...]
Going Olympic: countries that might
Very shortly you will watch the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games. Each country competing in the Games sends its athletes into the grand arena wearing blazers and waving national flags. As is customary, [...]
Comédie-Française: the French Elections
Today Monday I see that Monsieur Hollande has won the French presidential elections by 51-49%. How very French. M. Hollande claims to be a Socialist, though he is an intelligent man, and knows that socialism [...]
Canada
This is the second largest country in the world, and yet there is little mention of her in the media. Unless one of Canada’s great cities holds an Olympic Games, as did Montreal, you never [...]
Sunday philosophy; the paralysing discomfort of air travel
Though more people travel regularly by air than ever before; while international airports spring up at vast cost though not required (Spain has recently built two particularly pungent examples of this kind of wastage – [...]
British politics; Grenville & three Greys
William Wyndham Grenville, son of Prime Minister George Grenville, and a first cousin of the Younger Pitt was born in 1759. He went to Eton and Oxford (as do and did so many PMs), and [...]
Sad, sick, bloody Mary Tudor
Mary I (Tudor); awful father, awful headaches, propensity to burn heretics / simple.wikipedia.org Biographers have already used hundreds of pages to describe the life of this daughter of Henry VIII. In a super-brief [...]
Holocaust – the comments
Hundreds of comments have been posted on General-History following publication last year of the article on The Holocaust. Some comments are learnéd, some are not. Many are openly anti-Semitic. A few show sympathy with the [...]
General-History’s Sunday Humour
The bright young couple were proud of their beautiful Siamese cat, sitting observing the world at their feet one afternoon. The usual chorus of dogs in neighbours’ houses had just started, as it did twice [...]
Six men shaken, but not stirred, nothing but a dream
The admiral standing erect near the double entrance doors of the Connaught Hotel in Carlos Place is dressed as a doorman. No-one dares think of him as a doorman, for his majestic presence. Even his [...]
Henry VIII of England – The Tyrant King
Henry VIII England Taken from the point of view of their victims, Henry VIII of England was (almost) the equal of Ivan the Terrible of Russia (1530 – 84). Both had a merciless [...]
Fabled motorcars: a personal reminiscence
Now in 2012, they would be called ‘jalopies’, or ‘old crocks’, but in their epoch, some of the motorcars I have met driven were notoriously expensive, fast and comfortable. Some of the companies that made [...]
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