Apologies for the lack of recent posts. I have been finishing off my new book on Irish eccentrics which will be out sometime in September. On the subject of eccentrics, I would like to point you in the direction of a Sir William Arbuthnot Lane (1856 – 1943) There have been …
The appalling Roman emperor Caligula (12 – 41 AD) had a somewhat novel approach to foreplay according to the historian Suetonius in his De Vita Caesarum which was written in about 121 AD. Caligula was in the habit of inviting attractive aristocratic couples to dine with him. Then during a …
You probably didn’t know, and it also came as a surprise to me, that for 12 days, the city of Limerick in Ireland and its surrounding area was a self-declared Soviet Republic. This came about at the start of the Irish war of Independence as a protest against …
Who was the worst novelist in history? A worthy candidate would be a schoolmistress from Northern Ireland whose novels were so uniquely and thrillingly terrible that, in the early years of the last century, she became an ironic cause célèbre among the cultural luminaries of her time. Step forward, Amanda …
This famous piece of advice was supposedly given by Queen Victoria to her 17-year-old daughter, Princess Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise, on her wedding night in 1857, and has since become a catch-phrase for anything unpalatable. But it is most unlikely that the Queen ever said it; the phrase only appeared …
Sir Tatton Sykes ( 1826 – 1913) was convinced that in order to maintain good health the body should be kept at a constant temperature. In order to achieve this he had a collection of overcoats made for him, each a different colour and all made to fit over …
