A strange thing happened this week whilst researching for my upcoming WW1 book, I came across a good news story! In a war that saw much of an entire generation of young men lost forever, the story of the Calpin brothers is even more amazing as not just one or two joined up but 10… Continue reading The real-life Band of Brothers: A good news WW1 story!
Month: March 2014
Things I wish I’d known about grief
I wasn’t sure if I was going to post anything today or not but I thought why not, it will likely be the last post on my Mam and I thought this one might be more positive and help others. Sorry, I have missed the odd post this last 2 weeks but I have been… Continue reading Things I wish I’d known about grief
The 10 worst MPs of all time.
The British Parliament is composed of two Houses, the Upper House or House of Lords and the Lower House also known as the House of Commons as it houses the Members of Parliament or MPs elected by the common people. Surprisingly or maybe not as we in the U.K. don’t allow personal use of firearms,… Continue reading The 10 worst MPs of all time.
A letter to Mama
Today would have been my mothers 64th birthday, her first since she unexpectedly died almost a year ago so I thought it was high time that I caught up with her and updated her with some of my news and thoughts. Dear Mam, it’s been almost a year since I wrote to you on that… Continue reading A letter to Mama
Clouds loom over the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web
You might not know it but the modern internet is 25 years old today! It started life as an idea in a paper written by a young computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee in a rather obscure laboratory in Europe known as CERN. At first his idea wasn’t exactly taken on enthusiastically by his colleagues with… Continue reading Clouds loom over the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web
Bitten to death by a dead mans head: The unfortunate, deserving & true tale of Sigurd Eysteinsson
One of the slightly odd pleasures I had when I was studying at university was learning of various terrible ways people died or executed. To some degree this is normal for many historians but as I majored in amongst others, Mongol history, then it might be clear that I had more deaths than usual to… Continue reading Bitten to death by a dead mans head: The unfortunate, deserving & true tale of Sigurd Eysteinsson
The Book Thief
Yesterday I went to the cinema as I often do on a Tuesday morning, one of the benefits of working from home. Usually the cinema is empty with the staff outnumbering the movie-goers but not yesterday. The cinema is exactly 12 minutes walk away and there are usually 15 minutes of trailers before the film… Continue reading The Book Thief
The tragic genius of Vincent van Gogh
One of the things I was looking forward to when visiting Paris though was not the over-hyped Mona Lisa but the works of Vincent van Gogh in the Musee D’Orsay in Paris, one of the largest museums of modern art in the world. Van Gogh was a Dutch post-impressionist painter. His work is nearly always… Continue reading The tragic genius of Vincent van Gogh
Stephen Liddell 