I generally like Tim Powers' writing; his "secret history" kind of work appeals to me a lot. (I'll admit I haven't been as pleased with his work since "Last Call", or even since "The Stress of Her Regard", but it's still usually fairly good.) He's usually pretty good about not making demonstrably false historical statements. But ( Read more... )

This cartoon, depicting the unity cabinet appointed by Churchill when he took office in 1940, strikes me as interesting: some of the figures are rolling up their right sleeves, some their left. I can only identify two of them, Churchill (Conservative) in the front left, rolling up his right sleeve, and Attlee (Labour) next to him, rolling up his ( Read more... )

1968 was fifty years ago... I was ten years old, and just beginning to be aware of the outside world. (I have vague memories of the Pueblo incident, or rather my family's reaction to it, and I remember the Six Day War, but that's as far back as I can go.) God, that was a terrible year. I remember hearing the news of Dr. King's murder, and Bobby ( Read more... )

I've been a subscriber to the Library of America for many years. I've been pleased with their output, over the years; in addition to the usual suspects - several of the Founding Fathers, big-name authors like Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain, and so on - they've also published Grant's memoirs, a two-volume set of SF novels from the '50s (and they ( Read more... )

This Twitter account is fascinating: its posts describe events of World War II, hour by hour, seventy-eight years ago. The war started on September 1.

I'm currently reading Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel. (I downloaded it from Project Gutenberg when I was on an adventure-novels kick; The Prisoner of Zenda, Captain Blood, and one or two others were also part of that haul.) Three thoughts come to mind.

1) Spoilers. Going into the novel knowing the identity of the Pimpernel probably diminishes its ( Read more... )

One of the phenomena that so excited Charles Fort is that of the vitrified forts, crude stone buildings which at some point were subjected to intense heat ( Read more... )

I'm just going to leave this passage from Polybius, about King Ptolemy Philometor, here.If any king before him ever was, he was mild and benevolent; a very strong proof of which is that he never put any of his own friends to death on any charge whatever.

Still reading Wilson on the English Reformation. We're into the reign of Elizabeth, and I just hit the following:In July matters took a dramatic turn for the worse. Henry II of France was killed in a jousting accident. His son became king as Francis II and the fact that he was married to Mary Stuart meant that the crowns of England's closest ( Read more... )

After a bit of a hiatus, I'm back to reading Derek Wilson's A Brief History of the English Reformation. It's an interesting book and I'm learning a good deal, but once again I've stumbled over a careless assertion by Wilson ( Read more... )