Merry Christmas from the Restoration Navy!
A festive re-post from the very first Christmas of this blog, namely 2012… *** Henry Teonge, a Warwickshire clergyman, was fifty-five when he first went to sea as a naval chaplain, presumably forced into the job by the extent of his debts. In 1675 he joined the Fourth Rate Assistance, commanded by William Houlding, which […]
The Sandwich of Xanadu
Last week, I went along to the Historical Writers’ Association Christmas bash. This is always great fun – it’s good to touch base with one’s fellow practitioners, especially because our line of work is, by definition, pretty solitary. Above all, it’s always reassuring to find that author A has exactly the same issues that you […]
Stasis Revisited: Part Two
So now, as promised in Monday’s Part 1, here’s my utterly personal and idiosyncratic ‘top five’ of UK secondhand bookshops. As in the previous post, everything in black font after the section break below is material originally posted five years ago, when I only produced a top three; everything in red is brand new, and […]
Stasis Revisited: Part One
Last week, I used my recent holiday in Galloway as a perfect excuse to update an older post about King Arthur, first published four years ago when this site had a much, much smaller following than it does now. This week, I’m doing a similar exercise with an even older post, from the very early […]
The Offpeak Day Return of the King
A bit of an oddity for this week’s second blog. (And anybody thinking ‘the blogger’s a bit of an oddity anyway’ is toast.) Last week’s trip to Galloway – see the previous post – provided me with lots of inspiration of all sorts, and, thanks primarily to Wigtown, also provided me with lots more books […]
Dead Admirals Society Dons a Kilt
Apologies for the ‘radio silence’ last week. Regular followers of this blog will know that I sometimes take myself off to Landmark Trust cottages to brainstorm new novels or just to chill, and I spent last week at the tiny but perfectly formed Glenmalloch Lodge in Galloway. The upside of this was that even by […]
Societal Intercourse
I joined another society last week. Come to that, I stepped down from positions of responsibility at another, too, and the conjunction of the two events got me thinking about historical societies generally, and their roles in the modern world. I think I’m reasonably well qualified to comment on this, and to explore the challenges […]
Bang
I’ve come late to the whole thing about the BBC series Gunpowder. First and foremost, it’s good to see any primetime TV at all about the seventeenth century; and second and, umm, foremost, it’s even better to see primetime TV about the seventeenth century getting big audience figures and plenty of reaction from the critics and […]
Dead Admirals Society Goes Danish
In last week’s two posts, I talked about the lovely Swedish city of Karlskrona, and the international conference on dockyards that I attended there. I bookended the trip with stays in Copenhagen, which I’d never visited before – a shocking admission, especially as my grandfather was there as long ago as 1965, arranging the deal […]
Don’t Mention the Cold War, Part 2
In this week’s first post, I gave my impressions of the dockyard town of Karlskrona and its terrific naval museum. Now on to the reason why I was there, an international conference on International Approaches to Naval Cities and Dockyards, held in the museum. From the moment it started, it was clear there was a […]
