Every now and then facts present themselves, that on the face of it, seem unlikely to be true. As a writer on matters of historical interest, or not, as some may argue, I felt obliged to root out the actuality behind some of the more bizarre claims that purport to be historical facts. What follows… Read More

Titter ye not, as the late British comedian Frankie Howerd would have said. This particular tale takes us back to a time when Fanny was nothing more than an abbreviated form of the name Frances, and as you will be aware, a cock is a male chicken. Okay, now that we have cleared that up;… Read More

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30th 1835 in Florida. No, not the southern U.S. state. This Florida is a village in the U.S. state of Missouri. Never a large village, the population, according to the 2000 United States Census, was a whopping 9 residents! At 13 years of age Samuel became a printer’s… Read More

Being the sibling of a famous or infamous individual, overshadowed by your more renowned brother or sister, would be a frustrating experience, you might think. That was certainly the case for some of the following sisters of famous historical characters, but not all, it would seem.   Like her brother, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Maria Anna… Read More

William Brooke Joyce was born on 24th April 1906, into an Irish Catholic family, in Brooklyn, New York, United States. A few years after his birth, the family returned to Ireland permanently, setting up home in Salthill, Galway. After leaving school, William crossed the Irish Sea to England, to study at Birkbeck College of the… Read More

Following on from my earlier story about John Hampden, the English politician and nemesis of King Charles I, during which I mentioned the peculiar English habit of digging up the corpses of important people, long after they had been laid to rest, I decided to look a little deeper into this strange impulsion.   Unsurprisingly,… Read More

During his summer holidays in 1958, an American scholar by the name of Gerhard Weinberg (b. 1928), was trawling through German military documents captured by the United States at the end of World War II. His attention was drawn to a folder labelled “Draft of Mein Kampf“. As he began to examine the yellowing 324… Read More

Prior to the English Civil War (1642-1651) the power of the reigning monarch was absolute. They ruled by divine right, meaning their authority came from God, and no subject was at liberty to question that authority, let alone take up arms against their sovereign. The eventual outcome of the war, was the establishment of the… Read More

English is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world today. Approximately 360,000,000 people speak it as their first language, and to a staggering half a billion, it is their second language. Roughly speaking, English is a blend of the language spoken by the Anglo Saxons, who invaded England about 1,500 years ago,… Read More

  Sarah Pardee was beautiful and charming, musically talented and fluent in several languages. She lived with her parents in New Haven, Connecticut in the United States. Born in 1839, she was, by the 1860’s well known in social circles, and her company was sought after by many of the town’s eligible bachelors. The young… Read More