Rome, beautiful Rome! Is there anything I can say about the Eternal City that hasn’t been said before? No, but I won’t let that stop me trying. It was fantastic both in the sense of great and in the sense of unbelievable — it’s almost hard to believe I really was there. But I have […]
A curious snippet from Margaret MacMillan’s account of the Paris Peace Conference, Peacemakers (2002): Why not give it to Hughes of Australia, suggested Clemenceau.1 The ‘it’ was Heligoland, a small island in the North Sea, off the north-western coast of Germany. For most of the 19th century it had belonged to Britain, which swapped it
My second (and last) day in Edinburgh was unfortunately pretty much overcast the whole day, so my pictures are a bit dull. But as I spent most of the time indoors, this didn’t matter too much. (Above, Edinburgh Castle from the Princes Street Gardens.)
I’ve finally gotten around to adding Montagu of Beaulieu (pronounced ‘Bewley’, apparently) to my irregular series of biographies of airpower propagandists. He’s an important, but somewhat neglected figure, some of whose papers I’ve examined (those held at King’s College London). He helped found the Air League of the British Empire in 1909, and devised the
After wandering around Edinburgh Castle, I thought: castles are really cool! I wanted to see more, and since I probably should be a confident user of the British transport system by now, I decided that I’d do a day trip out somewhere to see one. A bit of googling led me to Stirling Castle, a
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] A historic building which once played a key role in saving the free world is about to be lost to posterity, with barely a whimper of protest. The story is of course more complex than that. When I say ‘lost to posterity’, that’s what I might say if I was
I’m now covering my last few days in the UK, which I mostly spent in Edinburgh. It’s a lovely city, but I’m sorry to say that I didn’t warm to it as much as I thought I would. That may have had something to do with inflated expectations (everybody I know who’s been there raves
I’ve recently come across what appears to be a new biography of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Hugh Montague Trenchard, 1st Viscount Trenchard, 1st and 3rd Chief of the Air Staff, etc: Sylvia Andrew, Lord Trenchard’s Choice (Richmond: Mills and Boon, 2002). I say ‘appears to be’ because there are serious discrepancies with the
Day two on the Roman frontier. This took some careful poring over the tourist bus timetable (route AD122, of course) to try and maximise the number of sites I visited while spending enough time at each one. This turned out to be be a non-trivial problem — the gap between buses varied considerably, and sometimes
A recent post on the new science fiction blog io9 (which I’m enjoying, but is it really so hard to put in spoiler warnings?) claimed that the Vickers Velos was the ‘ugliest and most worthless plane in the world’. Sure, it’s not pretty, but I’ve seen plenty that were uglier — fuglier, even. But there
