When we were very young, we occasionally heard adults sigh and say, “Of course it would be very nice to have a cottage in the country, but I…
Sir Francis Drake: Pirate or Patriot?
Drake (1540 – 1596) was an English admiral and explorer, the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world. He was unpopular, to say the least, in Spain, where he…
Winter of discontent followed by glorious summer?
We are now well launched into the year two thousand and eleven – eleven years after a change of century. As the infamous 20th gradually diminishes in our…
The Battle of Arnhem 1944
Arnhem is the sixth largest city in the Netherlands. It was the scene of fierce and remorseless fighting between 17 and 26 September, 1944, following the successful invasion…
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…
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…
Admiral Fisher (1841 – 1920)
John Arbuthnot Fisher was one of the last great fighting sailors, in the tradition of Nelson, Frobisher and Drake. He first went to sea as a midshipman with…
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…
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…
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…