You are looking at a spectacular tiara – natch, it belongs to the Royal Family. Was it plundered from a Maharajah, “borrowed” from a nabob? No it wasn’t.
Today it is a short blast up the motorway from Barmeath to Gormanston. It’s about twenty miles if you don’t mind paying the toll (my brother does). This was not the case in the 19th century.
Count Egmont was a 17th century Dutch freedom fighter seeking independence from the Spanish Empire in the Low Lands in what became known as the Eighty Years War (1568 – 1648). His story was romanticised by Goethe in his 1787 play, Egmont.
The Second World War and indeed the First – capital letters are an inadequate acknowledgement to the lives lost – are wars in which some of the combatants are known to me and probably you as family and friends. As a Pandemic Plus I’ve gained an incomplete insight into WW II.
After my ancestor, Patrick Bellew, was created Baron Bellew in the Peerage of Ireland in 1848 only three more Irish Peerages were handed out. That doesn’t sound quite right, but you know what I mean; namely Lord Fermoy (1865), Lord Rathdonnell and the Duke of Abercorn (both 1868).
You may recall that Alan Brooke was frustrated by Alexander’s lack of strategic vision in the North African and Italian campaigns in the Second World War (Trials and Tribulations). Was he being unfair?
Last month I alluded to two new “Bonking Biogs” and human nature being what it is, read the shorter of the two first: Gimcrack, A Rake’s Progress by Tony Scotland.
Who won the war? There is a strong argument that without massive American production of ships, ‘planes, guns and munitions (materiel), Germany would have won the war; even Stalin thought so.
Only one’s closest friends welcome Bertie as an overnight guest. This is his fourth time away, and two of the previous stays were in France. So far, it has gone well.