The Gothenburg: sailing back through time
When we went to Gothenburg earlier this year, we passed an 18th century ship moored up at one of the wharfs (as you do). It wasn't an actual 18th century ship but an reconstruction of a vessel that had sunk just outside Gothenburg in 1745. The wreck was...
Here’s one I prepared earlier
August 1 was the anniversary of the Battle of the Nile in 1798. I blogged about this two years ago so rather than blog about it again, I'm linking to the old post. It's here: The Battle of the Nile I've being blogging here for almost five years and on an earlier...
The long (and accident prone) road to motor regulation
I thought that we might take a break from 19th century history this week and look at something from around a hundred years ago. My wife, Tammy Goriely, has been doing some work on the regulation of self-driving cars and this has inspired her to look at how driving was...
Closing my ‘Journal of the Covid Years (for now at least)
There was no ‘Journal of the Covid Years’ this week – the first week since February that it hasn’t appeared. The diaries covered February 2020, when the word “coronavirus” first entered our consciousness to July 2020, when we could finally go to a café and get our...
The Massacre at the Bibighar
Today is the anniversary of the massacre of women and children at Cawnpore in 1857. To mark that event, I am making Cawnpore free for one day only. But what was the massacre and why did it become so infamous? Last month I wrote about the siege of Cawnpore and...
Journal of the Covid Years: Independence Day
'Independence Day', when we could finally go to a café or a hairdresser, was on 4 July, so, strictly speaking, I should have posted this extract last week. But it was such a big thing at the time that I felt it needed its own space. Saturday 4 July 2020 This is...
Politics and fantasy: can you tell the difference?
I’m not a big one for preparing my Friday blog posts ages in advance. I generally prefer to see what I can think of to write on the day or (as now) the day before. This week I really wasn’t sure what to talk about. There seemed to be quite a lot going on in the world...
Journal of the Covid years: a new start
Another short entry this week as we visit my beloved's journal entries from two years back. Next week's will be a long one -- marking 'Independence Day' a little late. It will also be the last of these regular posts. After Independence Day there was too much going on,...
Burke vs Sharpe! (Book review)
Sharpe’s Assassin is presented as a story about Sharpe freeing a spy from a fortress and then hunting down some rogue Bonapartists who would assassinate the victorious Duke of Wellington. It has enough similarities to Burke and the Pimpernel Affair (freeing a spy from...
Ice Houses
I’ve mentioned the work that’s been done on the beautiful Georgian villa of Marble Hill in Twickenham. Along the way, though, I’ve heard some very strange things from the ‘garden historians’ who advised English Heritage on restoration work. One of the strangest was...