Yesterday was the Summer Solstice.  Here in Britain the weather marked the occassion by soaking the assorted new agers, Druids and general mystics who turned up to celebrate at Stonehenge. The newspapers in turn celebrated the god of cliche by saying that their spirit was undaunted by the weather.  Whatever, it was good to see

Power is always relative.  The Roman Empire had lost some territory to the Persians, but this did not hugely reduce its resources.  It remained the big beast in the jungle.  For the Persians however, acquiring some new provinces enhanced their capabilities considerably over where they had been  before the peace treaty.  They were still at

Orwell’s account of his participation in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans has quite rightly achieved the status of a classic.   Orwell pitched up in Barcelona as a journalist intending to cover the war.  In the event he got carried away by the atmosphere of the time and ended up

    From the fall of Carthage in 146 BC to the arrival of Christianity at the end of the 2nd Century nothing much happened in the Roman province of Africa.  But although it was uneventful it was far from unimportant. The Romans used Africa as the name for the area around Carthage, modern day Tunisia,

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was highly influential when it came out and continues to make an interesting read, though it has rather swiftly slippd from being an interesting look at the contemporary situation to an interesting look at how the world looked in the Eighties.  Having read it not long after

The country the Pilgrim Fathers left for America from in 1620 was England.   Britain was purely a geographical expression, and not a particularly widely used one.  The United Kingdom of Great Britain came into existence in 1707 when the two states officially united.  Americans have continued to call the result  England to this day.