Pepys Into the Past
Last Friday, I was round at the Pepyses’ place. You know the Pepyses? Husband’s a civil servant, bit of a lad, eye for the women, always blogging? Wife’s half-French and a bit scatty? That’s right, those Pepyses. And I’m talking about their bijou pad in the country, not their place in town. Cute little place, bit of […]
Pepys Show
I was going to have a week off blogging. After doing five posts in a week for the Orkney and Shetland road trip, then another extra one to mark the rediscovery of King Richard III, I thought I deserved to put my feet up, or at most to do a nice short light-hearted post about […]
Saints and Soldiers: The Naming of Stuart Warships, c.1660-c.1714, Part 3.
Time for the third and final part of my discussion of warship naming under the later Stuarts. This topic has generated some interesting discussion, so I hope to return to it one day, particularly as more and more interesting connections keep coming out of the woodwork. For example, and despite the fact that the information […]
A Hope and A Sandwich: The Naming of Stuart Warships, c1660-c1714, Part 2
Back to post-Olympics reality! As promised, today’s post is the second part of my study of post-1660 warship names, originally intended for publication in an academic journal. I originally thought that this would be the concluding part, but I think the remaining material is too long for just one post, so I’ll postpone the conclusion […]
1665: The First Blast
The new Quinton novel, The Blast That Tears The Skies, is set against the dramatic events of the year 1665. This is one of the few dates in British history that most schoolchildren allegedly still know, but its prominence is due principally to the dreadful outbreak of plague that swept through London that summer – and from […]
Captains and Kings
First, apologies for not posting last week. As I mentioned on Twitter, I paid the price for getting too carried away on ‘Quinton 4’, The Lion of Midnight, and typing over 8,000 words in two days with little regard for ‘elf ‘n’ safety’. The result was that I woke up the next morning with a hand […]
