A few weeks ago, I went down a rabbit hole of researching my local duke and his family. And I started noticing a pattern. they would regularly have to inherit in ways other than father to son. Today, I will be cataloguing the story.....of the Duchy of Northumberland.
They wore this wool at Lodi, at Milan, at Mantua, and at Arcole. It would have been difficult to persuade these soldiers to go into battle without uniforms, and as such it is perfectly reasonable to make the claim that without British wool, France would never have won the War of the First Coalition.
6 min read
22/04/2023
This may seem an odd question with the gift of hindsight. When the French Revolution exploded into an international crisis, no country fought harder to suppress France than Great Britain (United Kingdom from 1801). Britain would not only act as financiers against the French Revolution, funding the multiple coalition wars, but the British Empire would also play an important military role both on land and at sea. It may come across as odd, perhaps, to ask why Britain would be opposed to the French Revolution.
9 min read
15/04/2023
At the end of last year I made public my resolutions, not only for the coming year, but also the next half decade. I went through a little of the history and tradition around the setting of resolutions at the New Year and also outlined the 10 (or 11) things that I had determined I ought to do to improve myself and my life. One of them was to re-embrace reading.
16 min read
24/12/2022
Four months ago we started series one of Publish and Be Damned by posing the question: is stoicism only fit for those who have never done anything courageous or powerful in their lives?
4 min read
10/12/2022
At the centre of the village in which I grew up, like so many others, there is a 9 foot stone pillar bearing the names of the five young men of the village who were killed during the Great War. At the last census, the village population was a grand total of 161 people, although with half of the houses in the village having been built in the 1960s, this would have been an appreciable percentage of the people living there in 1914.
6 min read
10/11/2022
Excellent news for those concerned about the state experimenting on children! The Tavistock Gender Clinic, the only NHS clinic specifically for ‘trans’ children is to be shut down! This is a huge win. The NHS has been ordered to close down the Tavistock clinic after a report had found that the clinic was failing to adequately care for children under 18, some as young as four.
8 min read
29/07/2022
The Trans-Atlantic Slave trade was bad, I know this is a popular opinion that almost everyone in the United Kingdom agrees with and has agreed with since the 19th century. It is an issue we solved nearly two centuries ago and have spent most of those two centuries paying off the debt incurred to end it. Not only did Britain stop their own participation in the trade themselves, they made it completely impossible for every other Trans-Atlantic empire to take part in it. There’s good reason to mention this, since there is a relentless demoralisation of Britain's history and empire because Britain was involved in the industrialised trade of human lives. We see it in the Guardian where they wrote about toppling Nelson’s Column. We see it when the National trust conducts politically motivated assessments into their statues and estates to see just how linked to the Slave Trade our historical figures were and either remove them or install information to call them evil.
6 min read
25/05/2022
Originally written by John for publication by the Mallard in their January 2022 Issue
3 min read
06/04/2022
The English language is a complex beast, full of rules and anomalies. It is something which has evolved over the space of more than a millenia and a half and over that time it has incorporated Latin, French and Old Norse (among other influences). It has grown and developed almost like an organism, with it's usage being adapted by the user over generations with elements being changed, added, or disposed of to suit regional tastes and catastrophic events.
11 min read
23/03/2022
Yesterday and Tomorrow.
14 min read
23/02/2022
After what has seemed like a period of stagnation, the space industry appears to currently be on steroids and the theme of space exploration appears to have re-acquainted itself with mainstream culture. There are now frequent news headlines and articles demonstrating progress with rocket technology and capabilities. The idea of sending manned missions further and further out into space for the benefit of humanity is exciting and fantastic, however during this nascent phase in space exploration it is important to maintain a steady focus on what is happening on this planet. With a potential decline in living standards and political instability featuring in several credible future scenarios this century, it is important for all members in society to contribute where they can to mitigate these risks. However, what is being presented in mainstream media as inevitable sacrifices, including the switch to bug protein as a staple food source, colder showers and pod-life is unpalatable and depressing. Whilst constraints on resources do risk causing declines to living standards and political instability, the aim of this article is to point out who should be removing these constraints. Due to the way the human brain works, anyone who is hysterical or in panic mode, cannot be also in problem solving mode and should be excluded from debate up front. This especially includes teary eyed celebrities broadcasting their emotions through the media.
7 min read
11/02/2022
A Few years ago, students and professors at the University of Plymouth published an article titled Are New Year’s resolutions a waste of time? They found that only 9% of those who made resolutions in 2017 felt that they had kept those resolutions, with a third having felt they had failed by mid-January with many people indicating that they felt they had set themselves an unachievable task.
8 min read
31/12/2021