Moving Swiftly On
Season’s greetings from the Dante-esque dystopia that is England’s new Covid Tier 4 (twinned with Purgatory and Niflheim; other afterlives are available), and yes, it’s time for my inevitable Review of the Year. So here it is. Enough of all that 24/7 excitement and non-stop global travel, so let’s […]
The Joy of Shelf
Libraries closed…repositories inaccessible…research trips impossible. OK, let’s keep things in perspective – none of this is remotely as important as people’s lives and wellbeing. But there’s no doubt that the pandemic has played havoc with historians’ and authors’ work, and I really feel for those with deadlines for theses or books and no way of […]
In Memoriam: Gijs Rommelse 1977-2020
It’s become something of a cliche to say that 2020 has been a year of tragedies on a global scale. Amid such horrors, it’s perhaps possible for individual losses to be diminished and to have less impact than would usually be the case. Last week, though, I learned the shocking news that my friend, the […]
Casting Off
Happy Trafalgar Day, everybody! This is, of course, always an auspicious day in the field of maritime history, but it’s especially so today. I’m proud and very happy to announce that the Society for Nautical Research, which I chair, is today launching The Mariner’s Mirror Podcast, which shares the name of our flagship journal, founded […]
On Tour: the International Festivals of the Sea
Events rather than places this week. Between 1996 and 2005, five major nautical-themed festivals took place in British ports. These combined the presence of ships and boats of all shapes and sizes with artists’ performances, displays and other entertainments, and were undoubtedly hugely successful in raising awareness of the role of the sea in national […]
Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing
The only certainties in life are death, taxes, and the fact that whenever naval history makes the news, somebody is going to get it calamitously wrong. That’s how it’s been here in the UK for the last week or so, where we’ve had the Prime Minister himself intervening in an argument over whether a song […]
