Favorite obscure countries: Laos

I have always loved maps and history.  Growing up in the USA in the early 60s, the Southeast Asian war gave me the opportunity to learn geography that the vast majority of Americans knew nothing about.  Laos was one of the obscure countries that was promoted to the first...

Richard Watson Gordon parades an amazing ignorance

Gordon is talking up an art exhibit on the subject of 19th century prostitution in Paris: It was a subject that interested them. Why? The obvious answer is that they were men, but another reason was that prostitution was linked to the idea of modernity. People had moved to the city, which was in itself a new concept, where the moral strictures of the village had disappeared. Gordon...

Another oddball medieval name from the Chronicle of the Good Duke

During my years with the Good Duke I have run across a number of surprising and amusing personal names: Bliomberis Loup and his brother, for instance (follow the "names" label to find him).I don't recall this classic name of an English knight involved in the Duke of Lancaster's chevauche in 1373:Sir Jean Bul...

If walls could talk: A BBC history of the home

My friend Nick Russon alerted me to the existence of a BBC 4 History of the Home now showing on Youtube. I have just watched the first of four episodes and I really like it. Part of it of course is the entertaining Lucy Worsley, who was made to be a TV presenter, but there's also...

Some people you just don't want to fight...

...because some people are just scum.During the first half of the Hundred Years War, when France was in chaos, disbanded soldiers often struck out on their own to fill their purses and their stomachs by capturing both warriors and civilians and ransoming them back to their lords...

Back to the Good Duke

After some months of writing other material, I am back to translating The Chronicle of the Good Duke, Louis II of Bourbon.  (I am astonished to see, by the way, that I started this translation in 2010.)  It's a fascinating view of one of the great warrior-princes (no, not...

A flash of truth cuts through the overheated rhetoric

A Guardian column on "alt-right" celebrity Katie Hopkins' carpetbagging critiques of London stumbles into an important truth. Marina Hyde: For now, it falls to her [Hopkins] to explain London to the Americans. “Londoners can’t even be honest about these attacks,” she told Fox News. “Because it would mean everything they believed in was false.” >Ah, the false idols of the decadent...