Vaguely Interesting Snippets | 2 May – 8 May 2012 James ‘Jim’ Callaghan is the only person to have served in all four of the Great Offices of State – Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary. Yes, Prime Minister – don’t give me any First Lord of the Treasury nonsense – the Ministers of the Crown Act 1937 gives unequivocal legal recognition to […]
Daily Archives: May 7, 2012
What springs to mind if you think of the phrase ‘white elephant’? Monuments to a politician’s hubris? The Millennium Dome? Unused and unloved Olympic venues around the world? Few people in England would associate this idiom directly with Elephas maximus, the Asian elephant, or imagine its roots in the royal courts of Burma and Siam. The Oxford English Dictionary hints at the two meanings for white […]