NB. Carlos III of Spain, Carlo I of Parma, Carlo VIII of Naples and Carlo V of Sicily were the same man.
One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if ‘Scottishness’ or ‘Englishness’ were essential constituents of som...
Culture is something that must grow. You cannot build a tree; you can only plant it, and care for it, and wait for it to mature . . .
An ambassador’, quipped Sir Henry Wootton, ‘is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.
I first heard of General Anders and his army more than 50 years ago. I admired him then, and I admire him still; and I feel a special bond with the men, women and children whom he rescued from hunger,...
The immediate future may be determined by a race between the United Kingdom and the EU over which beats the other to a major crisis.
And now I say unto Thee, take care and take heed, pious Tsar: all the empires of Christendom are united in thine. For two Romes have fallen, and the Third exists; and there will not be a fourth.
The shores of the Black Sea lend themselves to the literary genre that may be classified as 'cultural pilgrimage,' which is not just a higher form of travel writing but which has the further mission o...
According to whether one follows St Luke or St Matthew, the Christian Era began either in the last year of Herod the Great (4 BC) or in the year of the first Roman census in Judaea (AD 6–7).
All the nations that ever lived have left their footsteps in the sand. The traces fade with every tide, the echoes grow faint, the images are fractured, the human material is atomized and recycled. Bu...
Theorists of propaganda have identified five basic rules: 1. The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation between ‘Good and Bad’, ‘Friend and Foe’. 2. The rule of disfigurat...
The history of Royal Prussia, which fell into the Polish orbit, is little known to those who approach the Prussian story from an exclusively German perspective. (The subject was actively suppressed by...
Problem dewastacji środowiska przyciągał uwagę greckich władców już na początku VI w. p. n. e. Prawodawca Solon proponował wprowadzenie zakazu uprawiania ziemi na stromych stokach, aby zapobiec erozji...
By the seventeenth century the thaler had become a unit of currency all over central Europe. It had also been copied in Habsburg Spain, whose taleros or ‘pieces of eight’ circulated throughout the Ame...
Although the rival cereals of rye, barley,oats, buckwheat and millet have continued to exist in Europe, the triumphal march of king wheat was uncontestable
The Entente Powers, far from aiding Poland, regarded her activities with irritation. Poland won her independence for twenty years by her own efforts under the leadership of Piłsudski.
The dirham or dirhem was a coin of pure silver weighing 2.97 grammes, and worth one-tenth of a dinar. It was minted both in North Africa and in Central Asia under various dynasties. It was standard cu...
So long as men slaughter animals,’ the master said, ‘they won’t stop killing each other.’1 [KONOPIПTE]
Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly.
Every 30 seconds, it transmitted portions of [a Chopin Polonaise] to tell the world that the capital was still in Polish hands. Angered by the unexpected setback, the German High Command decided to po...