Saturday, June 30, 2012

On the look out for Boers

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Arthur Hamilton Baynes, a Church of England priest who served as Bishop of Natal in South Africa during the second Anglo-Boer War, died 70 y...
Monday, June 11, 2012

A peculiar pleasure

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The poet and teacher William Johnson, later called Cory, died 120 years ago today. Educated at Eton, he returned to the school to teach imme...
Thursday, June 7, 2012

A remedy for laziness

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Celia Fiennes, an extraordinary early British traveller, was born 350 years ago today. She journeyed all across England on horseback at a ti...
Thursday, May 24, 2012

Victoria’s diary online

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Images of all 40,000 pages plus of Queen Victoria’s diary - from 1832 to 1901 - have been published online as part of the Diamond Jubilee ce...
Monday, May 14, 2012

H-t was with me

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August Strindberg, considered by some to be the most celebrated Swedish author and playwright of all time, died a century ago today. Not kno...
Saturday, May 12, 2012

Awfully tortured by fleas

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Edward Lear, the great illustrator and creator of ‘nonsense’ poems, was born 200 years ago today, the day after, in fact, the assassination ...
Friday, May 11, 2012

An agony of tears

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Today marks the 200th anniversary of the only assassination of a British Prime Minister - that of Spencer Perceval. He was shot down in the ...
Thursday, May 3, 2012

The scarlet tanager

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Today marks the centenary of the birth of the writer May Sarton. She is not well known or remembered in the UK, but the anniversary is being...
Friday, April 27, 2012

The drollest mushroom

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher, speaker and essayist, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century, died 13...