My review of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has reached Chapter 31. If you have read the book you will recall that this is the chapter in which Rome is sacked, but the story has some involved twists and turns. It will take some hard podcasting before we get there, so let’s

This post will have to take the form of an open letter to David Withun.  Hopefully it will make sense to other people as well.

The troubles in Italy and Gaul left Britain isolated.  Its imperial forces had been withdrawn leaving low level garrisons to defend it from the depredations of the Picts and the seaborne Saxons. Being right at the bottom of the imperial todo list created a power vacuum in the province. There was a long trhttp://historybooksreview.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/multiethnic-team-using-green-screen-tablet-to-over-MVKF9J9.jpgion in

Johnny Hallyday needs no introduction to the French speaking world, but despite a career that is now over fifty years old you can still not assume that anglophones have even heard of him.  Those that have tend to be a bit bemused.  Back in the early sixties Johnny Hallyday made the momentous decision to sing

It is normal when talking about Philip.K.Dick to start by mentioning he wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep on which the film Bladerunner was based. So lets not do that. Ubik is much less well known and I doubt very much will ever get made into a film. It clearly falls into the science

We are all obsessed by the Second World War. So when I was invited by my daughter to watch an opera by Kurt Weil written in 1946 I was on the lookout for Nazis. Weil was a communist Jew who had fled to America to escape Hitler who would have taken a dim view of