20th Century
Postcard from Hiroshima
This is a note about my visit to the Peace Memorial Museum at Hiroshima. Some of what follows is gruesome. I’ve long been interested in military history, and I’ve been fortunate to visit the site [more…]
History
19th Century
A Bear’s Diary – Part 30
September 3rd, 1811. I have been too much occupied to keep up my diary for several months. We have all been toiling on the improvement of the Bear Inn, which had fallen into some disrepair [more…]
19th Century
A Bear’s Diary – Part 29
June 9th, 1811. At sea once more, we discovered that two of our crew had deserted, preferring the fleshpots of New York to their homeland and what will certainly be a more than generous reward [more…]
19th Century
A Bear’s Diary – Part 28
June 3rd, 1811. The city of New York lies in a broad river estuary whose wooded slopes give no hint of what will appear around the corner. The river is divided into several channels, forming [more…]
19th Century
A Bear’s Diary – Part 27
April 24th, 1811. Our wanderings have brought us to Trinidad, the largest and almost the easternmost of the chain of islands which dot the edge of the Caribbean Sea. Skirting the western edge of the [more…]
19th Century
A Bear’s Diary – Part 26
February 22nd, 1811. Late last night, as we were heading north-west in a moderate wind, a tremendous grinding crash threw the whole ship askew, and we found ourselves drifting with the sails flapping dangerously, threatening [more…]
20th Century
The devil is always in the detail
Cast your mind back to the morning of Friday the 2nd of May 1997. The British electorate had overwhelmingly swept Anthony Charles Lynton Blair to power, in a landslide victory that conjures imagery of a [more…]
19th Century
A Bear’s Diary – Part 25
December 25th, 1810. We celebrate our first Christmas at sea – or at least, the English humans and bears of our party do, for the Russian crew prefer to wait until their laggard calendar produces [more…]
20th Century
Why Germany? Part 2
After the Second World War, the need was felt to learn the lessons from history and make it impossible for Germany to cause any more catastrophes. Integrating the Federal Republic (aka West Germany) into a [more…]