The Fastest Duck in the City and the Immaculately Housetrained Rabbits
I don’t usually have film reviews in this blog, but then, they don’t usually make films about my historical period, i.e. the ‘Stuart age’. But the arrival in cinemas of The Favourite, the much-hyped film of Queen Anne’s relationships with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, and Sarah’s cousin Abigail Masham, was an opportunity that couldn’t be […]
America! America!
Attention, good people of the United States of America. I know these are strange and testing times in your wonderful land. I am told, for example, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt might no longer be your President, that your government has been shut down since 1789 last month, that I Love Lucy is no longer the mainstay of […]
Season’s Greetings
A very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all readers of this blog, and of my books! Here, demonstrating that family arguments and excessive consumption of the hard stuff have been Christmas ‘traditions’ for ever and a day, is Samuel Pepys on 25 December 1661… In the morning to church, where at the door of […]
Prize Season
I’ve had to keep this under my hat for the last couple of months, but now that the decision has been ratified, I’m finally able to announce that I’ve been awarded the Society for Nautical Research’s Anderson Prize for the best maritime history book of 2017, for Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and […]
Kindling Some Disinterest
A confession: I have a Kindle. While the world is generally united on the merits of the computer and the physical book, it’s split down the middle on the subject of Kindles (note: other e-readers are available), which is undoubtedly the Marmite of the literary world. Shaun Bythell, the famously – nay, mythically – grumpy […]
Lest We Forget
Posted at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, one hundred years on. Words are largely superfluous. Here, with minimal captioning, are some relics and memorials of the ‘war to end all wars’, encountered during my travels over the years.
