Cromwell’s killjoys almost silenced the English Christmas, but thanks to a royal family tradition the message is still being proclaimed.
England lost many long-standing folk-traditions during the republican Commonwealth (1649-1660), which banned Christmas celebrations along with music, plays and dancing. Some were reinstated after the Restoration in 1660, but there was plenty of room for fresh ideas.
How appropriate that the comic opera ‘Patience’ should introduce the world to the results of thirty years of labour.
Local boy Joseph Swan (1828-1914) worked for his brother-in-law in the pharmaceutical firm of Mawson, Swan and Morgan in Newcastle. He can claim to be one of the architects of modern living.
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An 18th century bon viveur and virtuoso violinist, Thomas Erskine is currently being ‘rediscovered’ by the classical music industry.
Thomas Erskine (1732-1781), 6th Earl of Kellie, was a Scottish musician and composer, who also founded a racy ‘gentleman’s club’ in Edinburgh called the Capillaire. His music has long been forgotten, and much of it is lost, but people are at last realising just how good some of it is.
On May 8th, 1945, Winston Churchill took to the radio to tell the British public that almost six years of war were ended.
VE Day is Victory in Europe Day, the commemoration of Germany’s surrender at the end of the Second World War. It is kept to this day (though with less and less pomp as each year goes by) on May 8th. The passage below collects a few of the more significant dates in the months that led up to the unconditional surrender signed at Berlin on that day (more or less) in 1945.
A half-starved cat is recruited by the Allies in the fight against Hitler.
In June 1941, some six months before the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbour brought the USA into the Second World War, the USSR declared herself for Britain and her Empire, at a time when European states from Finland to Greece had been unable to stem the Nazi tide. This little tale is based on events recounted by Ovadi Savich, originally in Soviet War News.
Now that King Odysseus has failed to return from the Siege of Troy, the earls of Ithaca are eager to marry his lovely widow.
Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey tells of the many adventures of Odysseus, King of the island of Ithaca in the Ionian Sea, as he returned home from the Trojan War after almost two decades away. Penelope, his grieving queen, has all but given up hope of seeing him again, and is under increasing pressure from Odysseus’s greedy earls to marry again.
In 1720, Welsh promoter William Howell opened a pleasure garden at Belsize House, but the pleasures drew the magistrates’ frowns.
In 1722, the pleasure gardens at Belsize House near Hampstead were raided by constables on the orders of horrified magistrates, as being a den of gambling, lewdness and riot. It had all started innocently enough two years earlier, after an enterprising Welshman named William Howell obtained a lease on the stately house and gardens.
A little fable from ancient Greece about those political activists who make a living from stirring up controversy.
The ancient Greeks were the first European people to form democratic governments. The experiment was not without its problems, chief among them being the ambitious ‘demagogues’ or ‘leaders of the people’ who made a living out of setting citizens against each other. The phenomenon did not escape the notice of the storyteller Aesop.
Timur, Muslim lord of Samarkand, threw his weight behind the Golden Horde’s subjugation of Christian Russia, with unexpected results.
Timur, who succeeded his father as Lord of Samarkand in 1369, traced his ancestry back to Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire in 1206. By the time of his death in 1405, he had humbled kings and kingdoms from Russia to Iran, India and Egypt, and changed the course of history more than once — though not always as he intended.