I am not a Daily Mail style hate everything in sight kind of person, but I was a bit anxious about how well the Olympic opening ceremony was going to go.  The preview had looked dreadful. Sheep and cows in a field?  What was that all about.  And we had the security fiasco as well.

Millenium is a very readable and entertaining book, though its premise that the year 1,000 was a big deal in Medieval Europe isn’t really justified.

I have previously written about how much I love my Kindle.  Sadly, like many love affairs, the relationship has come to a sudden and bitter ending when one of the parties let the other one down out of the blue.

  Gibbon was not alone in his fascination for the Roman Empire, and in the following generation Napoleon Bonaparte expressed his interest rather more practically by attempting to effectively refound it with himself as the new emperor.  So it is quite fitting that in one his first battles as emperor, at Eylau, he should find

Things are bad.  And they are getting worse.  Inevitable disaster looms in the not too distant future.  The only good news is that life is getting so hazardous that in all likelihood we personally won’t survive long enough to see the worst.

  It doesn’t do people or countries any good to dwell too much on past successes or failures.  I am old enough to have been taught at school about Britain’s naval successes and what I was taught was largely mythical.  I think it is a good thing that schools don’t do that kind of thing