Amsterdam Good Time, Part 2
Conferences are often opportunities to meet old friends and make new ones, and that was certainly true of last weekend’s conference in Amsterdam to mark the 350th anniversary of the Dutch attack on the Medway. I caught up with several people I hadn’t seen for ages, finally met some of my Dutch Twitter followers in […]
Dead Admirals Society on Tour: Sicily
By the time this post goes live, we’ll be sunning ourselves by a poolside in Sicily. It’s complete coincidence, of course, but this ties in very nicely with last week’s guest blog from Gijs Rommelse, about the film Michiel De Ruyter: the great Dutch admiral perished in 1676 in battle off Augusta, on the east coast […]
The Film and the Facts: About the Movie Michiel de Ruyter
I’m delighted to welcome a distinguished guest blogger this week, to bring relief from the recent overdose of politics! Gijs Rommelse is one of the pre-eminent Dutch maritime and political historians of the early modern period, being the author of The Second Anglo-Dutch War: International Raison d’état, Mercantilism and Maritime Strife, the co-author with Roger Downing […]
#2ADW350
Happy New Year to all! 2015 already, though…? I’m increasingly convinced that I fell through a worm hole in the space-time continuum in about 1976 and have largely lost track of things ever since. But then, I have a sneaking feeling that many of my friends, and my ex-students in particular, have suspected that all […]
Lights, Camera, Fireship Attack
There’s going to be a film about 17th century naval history. Don’t get too excited: it’s not Gentleman Captain: the Movie, more’s the pity. Instead, the Dutch are making a film about their great national hero, Michiel De Ruyter, apparently set during the years 1672-3. From what I’ve seen so far, it looks very promising indeed. […]
