I'm on a train going from Berlin to Prague and the train has just gone through Losovice. Looking for that on the map, I realise I'm going past Terezin.

Also posted to Dreamwidth. There are
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 Some years ago I visited the battlefield of Waterloo.  In the bookshop in the visitors' centre I found a book (in English) about the Napoleonic Wars.  I paid for it by credit card.  The price was in Euros, of course, but I was amused to discover that with the current conversion rate, when I received the credit card bill the price was £18.15 ( Read more... )

 I subscribe to Sky Cinema and they show an interesting range of foreign language films.  The other night I was browsing through  the channels and discovered they were showing a Norwegian film called The King's Choice (Kongens Nei).  When I saw the subject of the film I was intrigued ( Read more... )

Every day during the summer when I was in Helsinki for Worldcon, I used to cross a street called Mannerheim and then pass a statue of G.C. Mannerheim. I was so intrigued as to who Mannerheim was that I looked him up on Wikipedia. He was a Finnish general who was post-war president of Finland (and much, much more). During the war, he led the ( Read more... )

I'm reading a history of the War of 1812 at the moment, by Jon Latimer, published in 2007. At one point he refers to a naval encounter that took place "off Cape Canaveral (now Cape Kennedy)."

Except that its name was changed back in 1973. I suppose that saying a historian is living in the past is a bit of a cheap shot.

According to The Observer, Mike Leigh has been filming Peterloo in Guildford this summer, Guildford standing in for 1819 Manchester. I remember hearing about Peterloo in school history, and there's an overture by Malcolm Arnold commemorating it.

Can't say I've seen any evidence of the filming.

About this time of year I take down from my bookshelves a book I read a long time ago and re-read it, a different book each year.  This year I have decided upon Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess.  It is the centenary of his birth in February ( Read more... )

The summer of 1975 I was living in London but working in Guildford, having been seconded to the Guildford office by the CEGB.  I was living in Bowden Court, a hostel in Notting Hill run by the London Hostel Association originally designed to house civil servants newly moved to London.  (It's still there, but by their website, it seems they cater ( Read more... )

When I  was at the history museum  in  Seattle on Sunday, I overheard one of the guides tell some visitors that the Seattle World's Fair of 1962 (for which the  Space Needle was built) was the first World's Fair after WWII ( Read more... )

I've mentioned this 1900s set Canadian crime show before.  However, there are some things in it that I guess work better if you are actually Canadian.  An episode titled "Murdoch Night in Canada" involving an ice hockey team only means something if you know there is a television programme called "Hockey Night in Canada", as I discovered long after ( Read more... )