The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Land of the Blind There is a joke in the army that after a conflict we used to have “lessons learned” sessions to ensure we would avoid similar mistakes in the next conflict, but we had to rename “lessons learned” to “lessons identified” as we frequently identified...
Orwell & The Past He who controls the past controls the future. Past time in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a shadowy affair, a matter of casual inferences and stray fragments of detail. There may at one point be talk of the nuclear warhead that fell on Colchester during...
In the summer of 1870, France declared war on Prussia. Within weeks, it faced invasion by a Prussia-led German coalition that included both the North German Confederation that Prussia dominated and the southern German states of Bavarian, Baden, and Württemberg. The...
Mycenae: Behind the Myths Most ancient Greek myths take place during a heroic age, when men fought with monsters and gods walked among us. The roots of these myths are in an often-overlooked period of Greek prehistory: the Bronze Age. The Greek poet Hesiod identifies...
It is generally accepted that the European Renaissance began in Italy. However, as this developed south of the Alps a historical transformation of similar magnitude began taking place in northern Europe. This ‘Other Renaissance’ was initially centred on the city of...
My Enemy’s Enemy: The German-Japanese Intelligence Alliance The years leading up to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour saw a strengthening of diplomatic relations between Japan and Germany, and growing cooperation between their intelligence services. This is where I...
The letter begins as an intimate billet-doux. ‘Oh Harry, my own precious darling, your letter today is one long yearning cry for your little love.’ But within a few lines, a more sinister story begins to emerge. ‘Yesterday, I administered the powder you left me . . ....
Following the tale of two New York lost souls ‘dreaming bigger’ than they have a right to, Syncopation stars Devon-Elise Johnson (Anna Bianchi) and Jye Frasca (Henry Ribolow) in a warm, ballroom-inspired comedic amalgamation of frustration and hope. The guilded age of...
The young Mátyás Rákosi (1892–1971) loved London. The son of a Jewish shopkeeper in southern Hungary, he had made his way there via Hamburg in 1913. Already a socialist, Rákosi had immediately joined the Communist Club in London’s Fitzrovia, whose Hungarian members...
It’s one of history’s greatest myths: Napoleon Bonaparte was short. This is not quite true. In 1815 an English captain described him as “a remarkably strong, well-built man, about five feet seven inches high”. He was above average height of the time, and would have...
