Another condescending feminist wants to learn us that our view of Georgian womanhood is all wrong: Sexual favours, swearing and drinking – why everything we think about 19th century women is wrong The imminent adaptation of Emma, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, which happily promises to be more searingly comic than most, nevertheless presents the cast […]
Here’s one for those people who think slavery is all about white people enslaving black people: For over 300 years, the coastlines of the south west of England were at the mercy of Barbary pirates (corsairs) from the coast of North Africa, based mainly in the ports of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Their number included […]
One of the big mistakes humans make is they they often think that the only sort of people who want to rule them with an iron hand are the sort of big, loud, shouty, axe-wielding thugs who have traditionally lusted for power and ruled over us with an iron hand. It’s an easy mistake to […]
If you know your Commie history then you may know that Stalin had a son called Yakov with his first wife, in addition to the rather better-known boy and girl, Svetlana and Vasily, who he had with his second wife. But did you know that Stalin had another son as well? And that the mother […]
I’m currently reading Robert Service’s bio of Stalin. It’s good so far, but it has one annoying aspect to it that almost every other history book or biography shares, and that is that it just doesn’t remind you enough of what the year in question is. What I mean is that there will be plenty […]
It is popularly held as a period when Britain and the rest of the world fell into a deep decline. But according to the British Library, the Dark Ages were anything but. The curator of a new exhibition has suggested the term unfairly maligns a time of great creativity and enlightened thinking. This is largely […]
Recently I blogged about the bungled attempted assassination of Trotsky that took place in Mexico in 1940, a few months before the successful one happened. It was both incompetent and nasty, so much so that it would make a good comedy along the lines of The Death of Stalin. There’s a lot more to this […]
The killer of Trotsky, Ramon Mercader, refused to admit that he had been hired by Stalin to commit the murder: Even after his identity had been established fingerprints, he refused to admit who he was or why he had come to commit the murder. The official Stalinist version was that he was a disgruntled Trotskyite, […]
Caveman left toaster on too long: Charred crumbs found in a pair of ancient fireplaces have been identified as the earliest examples of bread, suggesting it was being prepared long before the dawn of agriculture. The remains – tiny lumps a few millimetres in size – were discovered by archaeologists at a site in the […]
I don’t think it’s well-known that the Germans could have crushed the Russian Bolshevik government in its early days, but chose not to. The Bolsheviks had a tentative grip on power, and Russia was in chaos. The Germans debated whether to go in to Moscow and St. Petersburg and remove Lenin and his cronies. In […]
Perry de Havilland reminds me in the comments of the Katyn Forest massacre. Never mind the Russians’ role in World War II being under-appreciated and not well-known enough. How often does this tale get told? Stalin and Beria ordered the murder of between 16 and 27 thousand Polish officers, who were being held as POWs, […]
I’ve been seeing on Twitter and the blogosphere some recent claims that the USSR was the real unsung hero of World War II, because they did the most damage to the Nazis, and suffered the most losses, and we would have lost without them, and this achievement goes mostly unrecognised, so we should be more […]