Anticlericalism
Anti-clericalism is not the same as anti-Christian movements. Most Roman emperors tried to stamp out Christianity from the death of Christ under Tiberius until Constantine the Great decided to adopt Christianity as an official religion [...]
Mazzini and Garibaldi
Giuseppe Mazzini (1805 – 72) has been called ‘the apostle of Italian republicanism’. He was a doctor’s son, born in Genoa, and was politically minded enough to enlist in the Carbonari (a violent Italian secret [...]
Admiral Fisher (1841 – 1920)
John Fisher photographed around the time of his cooperation with the White Rajah of Sarawak / en.wikipedia.org John Arbuthnot Fisher was one of the last great fighting sailors, in the tradition of Nelson, [...]
Yezhovshchina – ‘The Great Purge’
Apart from being difficult to pronounce, my title is a Russian term describing the Great Purge in Soviet Russia between 1936 and the end of 1939. It took place roughly at the same time as [...]
The Ancien Régime: what was it and did it work?
Countless times as you read books and learned pamphlets on history, you will meet the French words Ancien Régime. It is an easy bet that many of us only half know what these two simple [...]
Spain: This peculiar strike
I have not mentioned the air traffic controllers ‘strike’ because the media has talked of nothing else since the dreadful weekend at the beginning of December, when all air traffic over Spanish territory was cancelled [...]
Some Health Ministers of Europe: A comparison
European Health Ministers A kind correspondent sent me the following details about Health Ministers in France, Portugal, Italy and Spain, in that order. It makes interesting reading, if a bit frightening when we come to [...]
Famous Spy Masters through the ages
In the first of this three-part series about British and international secret services and their chiefs, three British spy-masters were described fairly extensively – those three who controlled British Intelligence from its creation as ‘SIS’, [...]
The end of the Church of England?
Carey ex-Archbishop of Canterbury confessed he ‘had doubts about his Faith’ All ends have to have a beginning, and the beginning of the end for the Church of England started at the beginning [...]
British Intelligence Services
In a recent edition I talked about MI6, which was once called SIS, and which, oddly enough, is mostly referred to these days using that original acronym (the Secret Intelligence Service). In many ways the [...]
Cardinal Richelieu: a much maligned duke
The real Cardinal Richelieu / commons.wikimedia.org In half a dozen films, especially Hollywood films, the figure of the Duke of Richelieu has been categorized by famous actors as a plotting, conspiring, malignant courtier [...]
David Cameron: How is he doing?
Not very long ago the British people decided they had had enough of Blairism, not enhanced much by Brownism when Tony Blair stood down as prime minister. Typically, they just managed to elect a Tory [...]
Happy birthday MI6
I am reminded by the publication of an enormous new book (810 pages) written by Keith Jeffery that Great Britain’s first official secret service agency has just passed its hundredth anniversary. The book is called [...]
History of the Czech Republic
What happened to Czechoslovakia? The middle-European country formerly known as Czechoslovakia was created from the northern part of the collapsed Austro-Hungarian Empire, at the end of the First World War. The then new state incorporated [...]
The Schlieffen Plan
The ‘Schlieffen Plan’ / schoolhistory.co.uk General Count von Schlieffen (1833 – 1913) was Chief of the German General Staff from 1891 until he retired in 1905. As a testament to his work for [...]
The White Rajah of Sarawak
In a recent article, I published a brief account of the rise and fall of the British empire. The empire was just as much a product of private enterprise and individual initiative as it was [...]
Holocaust: Facts and figures
The word itself comes from the Hebrew word Shoah. This was the affliction suffered by Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe from 1933 to 1945. It is usual to divide the ordeal into two periods, before and [...]
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