The fourth episode of Andrew Marr's History of the World was mostly about the European Renaissance - but not about what happened during it. Instead it was about what happened in the rest of the world that made it possible for Europe to go from being a cultural backwater to a vibrant civilisation with pretensions towards becoming one of the ( Read more... )

Yesterday was the first Essex Egyptology Group meeting of the year, and the talk was given by Sally-Ann Ashton who works at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge both as a curator of their Egyptian collections and in their outreach education programme in prisons. The focus of her work for the last few years has been looking at Egypt from the ( Read more... )

Yesterday was another Members' Open Evening at the British Museum, so J took the day off & we headed into London for the afternoon & evening. Found yet another slightly different route to get to Cockfosters (A12/A414/M11/M25) on the way there, which was just as well as the A12/M25 junction was (unexpectedly to us) shut on the way home & I was able ( Read more... )

TV night last week didn't get written up coz we were away - and it was a triple bill (as we weren't up very early on the Thursday morning). So hopefully I can remember something about what we watched! This is probably going to be a bit briefer than usual ( Read more... )

Wednesday night we watched the second half of the Henry VIII programme. This covered the post-first-divorce period, and thus covered a lot of destruction of artworks (including architecture) - in particular as part of the dissolution of the monasteries. And along the way we got all the usual biographical details including the last 4 wives (in ( Read more... )

New programmes all round last night - we'd finished both series we'd been watching so time for new things. First up was the first part of Henry VIII: Patron or Plunderer? which is a two part thing we've had recorded for months but not got round to watching. It's presented by Jonathan Foyle, who we'd seen as a guest talking head on a Time Team ( Read more... )

On Saturday we went to a lecture in Cambridge - every year there's a Stephen Glanville Memorial Lecture on Egyptology, given by some notable person in the field, organised by the Fitzwilliam Museum. Last year was pretty much the sort of thing I'd expected - a talk about Memphis (capital of Egypt in the Old Kingdom period) given by Jaromir Málek, ( Read more... )

The first programme of the evening was the next episode of A History of Christianity - this time about the Reformation & Protestantism. The continuity announcer said it was about a "schism in the church" as if this was somehow different to the other programmes - which made us laugh as we've already covered at least 2 schisms before this one ;) ( Read more... )

Started the evening with a BBC4 programme about Omar Khayyam - we'd been putting it off coz we thought it was 2 hours, but it seems our PVR decided to record an extra hour of the "BBC4 returns at 7pm" screen, which was a tad odd. We'd also managed to record the sign-language translated one, which isn't half distracting if you're not deaf & thus ( Read more... )

Started off TV night with the second episode of A History of Christianity, which was all about Catholicism and called The Unpredictable Rise of Rome. And if the first episode was about how Christianity fared when it was a minority living in & with a different culture (both Islam & in China) then this was a story, as he said, of what can be ( Read more... )