Yesterday, over on Facebook, I was invited to sign a petition for the reburial of Richard III at York (a 'cause' that has me ROTFLOL because, you know, I really don't care) that began, "I respectfully demand..." Apart from the fact that this smacks of "With all due respect..." (i.e. none) if I received that it would be binned at once ( Read more... )

I was twelve. I woke up at about seven, and switched on my radio. This was an ex-household radio which had been replaced with a radiogram. It must have been manufactured in the 1930s, was over a foot long and about nine-inches high, painted in the same blue and white as the rest of my bedroom, and sitting on its own shelf. I got up, and switched ( Read more... )

Just in case there is still anyone on my flist who thinks that Hitler was an atheist, here is a link to a whole list of quotes from the man himself ( Read more... )

I wasn't sure what to expect from this documentary on T.E. Lawrence, broadcast yesterday on BBC2. The presenter, Rory Stewart, had the background to be able to comment with some authority on Lawrence's effect and legacy in the Middle East, but Lawrence documentaries - and books - tend either towards hagiography or a debunk. This was neither - but ( Read more... )

About fifteen years ago, just after we had moved to Chigwell Row, inamac and I heard about a ruined Great House, which burned down early in the 20th Century, with a famous now-overgrown garden buried deep in Epping Forest. It was on the maps, but not, supposedly, accessible. Because we really wanted to see this place before it fell down, we drove out ( Read more... )

The second book in my trio of popular science books is also the second most complex in style but the least important. I've come out of the experience of reading it with a lot of trivia, but not a lot of science I didn't know previously. Your experience may vary - I've done a lot of reading in the biological sciences over the years ( Read more... )

I will admit that, of the astonishing group of Enlightenment scholars who comprised the US 'founding fathers', I knew less about John Adams than I did about Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. This has been corrected by the brilliant US miniseries, which ended in the UK last Saturday ( Read more... )

One thing that has made me angry about the whole "Expelled" saga is the way the film equates Darwin and the scientists who defend the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis with the Nazis and Hitler. Unfortunately, however, a lot of people, myself among them, have always suspected that there was, indeed, an element of the regrettably named "Social Darwinism" ( Read more... )

I don't have a drop of spirituality in me. Rejecting Christianity at age fourteen was more a casual acknowledgement that I hadn't believed that stuff for years than any sort of wrench. Indeed, I wouldn't know the date if it hadn't been that my parents and grandparents expected me to be Confirmed, and I told them to forget it. I never expected ( Read more... )