The second episode of Prehistoric Autopsy was all about Homo erectus, and they were building a model of Nariokotome Boy. This is a 1.5 million year old near complete Homo erectus skeleton & the most complete one ever found. They started off with context, again - Homo erectus only died out relatively recently, but was around for 2 million years, ( Read more... )

Last night we watched the first part of Prehistoric Autopsy which was all about the Neanderthals. This is a three part series presented by Alice Roberts & George McGavin plus a whole team of experts - the format is that they have a "lab" set up with various different experts & they demonstrate some of the research that's been or is being done ( Read more... )

The printing press was invented in Germany around 1440, and by 1476 had even been brought to the relative backwater of England, by a man named William Caxton. The guests on the episode of In Our Time that talked about this were Richard Gameson (University of Durham), Julia Boffey (Queen Mary, University of London) and David Rundle (University of ( Read more... )

The third episode of "Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World" started in the 1770s when the British had just made peace with the French, and went through to the aftermath of the Battle of Trafalgar (when the British again made peace with the French after a couple more wars). The thread used to tie the whole episode together was ( Read more... )

The second episode of "Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World" started with the defeat of the English Navy by the French in 1690 - still one of the most humiliating defeats of the Navy. At this time the French were the dominant sea-going nation, and the programme covered the recovery of the Navy over the following 70 years until ( Read more... )

On Sunday we listened to the In Our Time programme on Gerald of Wales. The experts on the show were Henrietta Leyser (University of Oxford), Michelle Brown (University of London) and Huw Pryce (Bangor University) and they talked about Gerald of Wales's life & books ( Read more... )

Started TV night off last week with the first episode in a series we'd recorded back in February - "Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World". The theme of the series is the history of Britain over the last 400 years, seen through the lens of the Royal Navy. This first episode (Heart of Oak) started with the growth of the navy ( Read more... )

I've finally got my photos sorted out from our visit to the Tower of London at the beginning of November and I've uploaded them to flickr - highlights in this post, more if you click through to flickr.


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TV night last week included the last episode of the Andrew Marr series - this time taking us from the aftermath of World War 1 through to the present day (roughly speaking). So a lot of what it covered were atrocities - we had Nazi atrocities (tho not actually discussed, what was covered was Hitler's rise to power with an emphasis on the fact that ( Read more... )

We held TV night on Tuesday this week, so that J could play Assassin's Creed III as soon as it arrived yesterday. This also meant we fitted three programmes into the evening & caught up with ourselves with the Andrew Marr one ( Read more... )