On Good Friday in 2012, the story of the Passion of Christ was played out live on BBC One from the distinctly unlikely surroundings of Preston Bus Station. Preston’s Bus Station is an iconic piece of 1960s architecture and arouses strong feelings in the face of the City Council’s proposals to demolish it. But whatever the merits of this icon of brutalism, it is a world […]
Monthly Archives: April 2012
In Thomas Penn’s ‘The Winter King’, Henry VII is depicted as neurotically protecting his precarious grasp on the English throne. On page 20, Penn describes the security measures the new monarch puts in place: “One of his first acts was to create a new French-style security force, three hundred strong: the yeoman of the guard.” The Yeoman of the Guard? French? This was enough to pique […]
A “French-style security force” – the origin of the yeomen of the ...
Vaguely Interesting Snippets | 30 March – 5 April Future president of the USA, John F. Kennedy, spent a summer’s vacation from his university studies at Harvard touring Europe. His journey included a spell in Nazi Germany and he only made it to London on 1 September 1939. He was in the gallery of the House of Commons to hear the United Kingdom’s declaration of […]
Vaguely Interesting Snippets | 22 March – 29 March A vast array of vaguely interesting snippets that aren’t quite long or interesting enough to be articles all on their own! Did an American women prevent Hitler from committing suicide after the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923? Helen Hanfstaengl’s brush with history isoutlined in Andrew Nagorski’s Hitlerland. The Louvre in Paris is the world’s most visited art […]
Stephen Irvine, 5 April 2012 The asylum teemed with the grey-faced and the hopeless; shuffling cardboard cut-outs no longer able to communicate with the world at large, each believing themselves completely alone despite taking their place in the most intense of throngs. To attempt to shatter their sense of isolation with the mallet of conversation was tantamount to waving into blind eyes. The uninitiated found whatever […]
A Gregg-ular Kind of Guy
Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were certain of their place in history as soon as they left Apollo 11’s Lunar Module to walk on the surface of the moon. Their steps provided the images to accompany Armstong’s immortal words on the giant leap mankind had taken. Less well known was the ‘first’ Aldrin accomplished before even exiting the capsule – the first sacrament of Communion taken […]
Holy Comoonion
The word ‘bonus’ used to have such positive connotations. As most people understand it, it refers to something given or paid over and above what is due – a nice little extra, a financial thank you or a congratulation in cash. The Oxford English Dictionary sets out a delicious definition of bonus as “a boon or gift over and above what is normally due as remuneration to the […]
Bonus as a dirty little word
The period immediately following Germany’s defeat in the Second World War became known as Stunde Null, or zero hour. It become the bleakest chapter in the nation’s modern history. There was no longer even the hope of a surprise victory – Germany was a defeated and occupied country facing an uncertain and divided future. It had plunged the world into a global catastrophe and its armies […]