Trust is one of the more beautiful words in the English language. It is also a very fragile word. Just like respect, trust is hard to earn and easy to lose, and once broken, trust is difficult to repair. To trust someone is to take a leap of faith. After all, you don’t know if […]
Today’s post is about a gentleman who is mostly famous for two things, one of which is not having a nose. It is strange, isn’t it, what peculiar aspects of people go down as truly noteworthy for future generations, and in this particular case the loss of a nose clearly overshadows the impressive intellect and exciting
Today, I’d like you to meet Ralph Stafford. I will come clean right from the start and say that I am in two minds about this gentleman, but I’m guessing my opinion is pretty irrelevant to a man who has been dead 600 years and counting. It’s not as if dissing him on FB is
Some months back, I posted about the unhappy Juana of Castile and her erratic behaviour when her husband died. Grief, it seemed, pushed her over the edge, and life would never again be the same. In Juana’s case, very much the truth, what with her spending over four decades locked up. There are, of course,
Ugh. I’m going to come clean here and admit I don’t like New Year celebrations. Don’t get me wrong – I like the parties and the good food and the champagne and the dancing, but the closer we get to midnight, the more I start to feel a certain malaise spread through me. It
They say life may be possible on other planets. There is water on Mars, even on the moon, and as long as there’s water, life as we know it has a fighting chance. Or so they say. The future of humanity may lie beyond our galaxy, as intrepid colonists of other worlds, so distant the
I must admit from the start that I have little fondness for Thomas of Lancaster, one of the protagonists in today’s post. For those of you who do not immediately go “Aha! Dear old Thomas,” Lancaster was the nephew of Edward I, and eldest son of Edmund Crouchback. While I’ve never had the pleasure of
Some while ago, I published a post about Finnish history – very much inspired by a Finnish colleague of mine plus an abiding fascination with this country to the east of my own, a country whose history has per definition been tangled with Sweden – or Russia, or both. Anyway, some days after my post,
On the last day of November 1718, the Swedish Empire hit the dust, crumbling into non-existence with the death of Karl XII. This our last warrior king was out inspecting his positions in Norway when an unidentified object hit him in the temple and killed him. Since then, debate has raged as to whether it
Edward I comes down through history to us as a man not much given to romantic gestures. This after all, is the man who implemented being hung, drawn and quartered for treason, who expelled the Jews in 1290, and who spent a considerable part of his life hammering the Welsh and the Scots into submission