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 the British …
“Used in present-day English chiefly by America speakers as a synonym for the aubergine, aubergine was originally applied specifically to the white-skinned, egg-shaped variety of the vegetable. This was in the mid-eighteenth century (available evidence suggests that the term predates aubergine by about 30 years). By the middle of the …
Nothing sums up the Victorians’wonderfully prudish attitudes to sex as to the the thought that they were aroused by piano legs. Matthew Sweet, in Inventing the Victorians (2002), describes the origin of this story. In 1837, a Captain Frederick Marryat, the author of The Children of the New Forest (1847), …
Cricket can change the course of history (well, sort of). I bring you the tale of Frederick, Prince of Wales, the son of George II who died in 1751 following a cricketing mishap. He was playing cricket, misjudged a catch and the cricket ball hit him on the head. He …
