History Archives - Page 33 of 71

Temple Bar

Wouldn’t it be grand if Temple Bar is where lawyers go for a slurp but they frequent El Vino instead. May I digress?

There are four original copies of the charter signed by King John and his barons in 1215. Two of them may be found in the British Library, the others at Lincoln Castle and Salisbury Cathedral. So I didn’t see one yesterday when I went with a friend to Runnymede. She hadn’t been before and I… Continue reading Magna Carta Libertatum

The Battle of Bouvines

The Battle of Bouvines is not one of those famous battles like Agincourt, Crécy, Blenheim, Waterloo, El Alamein. This is simply because, in spite of being in an alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto IV, and having numerical superiority the English army was given a good beating by King Philip Augustus of France. As… Continue reading The Battle of Bouvines

Alan Brooke’s War

Colville’s Downing Street Diaries have led me on to General, Sir Alan Brooke’s wartime diaries. He later became Field Marshal, Viscount Alanbrooke, slightly confusingly. The diaries are a daily record of his war.

Boohoo

Boohoo, or crying all the way to the bank?

Més que un chess club

If you know a finer clubhouse for chess aficionados, tell me. This is the Nuovo Circolo Degli Scacchi in Rome. It’s almost worth playing chess to belong but I can pop in as a reciprocal member and have done so.

Wartime Reading List

John Colville’s Downing Street Diaries are not what they seem He could be taken to task under the Trade Descriptions Act (1968) as on the first page he “was living in luxury, at least by war-time standards, and basking in the Prime Minister’s favour.”

Quizzers

I have just bought an inexpensive, second-hand, dog-eared paperback published in 1987 in which are appended the author’s biographical notes on some of the people mentioned. Can you identify even one of them?

Old Palace Lane

The walk upstream to Richmond is back on Bertie’s and my agenda. Yesterday we completed it in two hours, thirty-five minutes; creditable considering Bertie had to play with a canine chum, board a houseboat (Avanti), and join a picnic.

HMS Tyne, March 1957

In 1956 Patrick Nairne was “head of the Middle Eastern and international law section of what was, rather quaintly, known as Military Branch of the Admiralty secretariat“. He found himself “though relatively junior, in a front-line administrative post during the Suez affair”.

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