Chris ‘Stumbling and Mumbling’ Dillow asks five questions. Here are my answers; number two is the best. I’ve put Chris’s questions in italics.
1. The government wants children to learn about the slave trade. But in 18th century England, how much different were the living conditions of the average slave from those of the average unskilled [...]

On a recent trip to Hammersmith, I saw something of a blast from the past. The cash machines in the Broadway advertise themselves as being available for customers of, amongst others, Midland Bank. So old was the sign that it had the griffin-in-a-circle motif rather. Midland was, as we know, bought by HSBC; before the [...]

James ‘Nourishing Obscurity’ Higham asks:
“Which individual has had the most influence on humanity worldwide since WW2, such that if they had not been around, human history would have had a significantly different outcome”
I don’t really subscribe to the ‘great man’ theory of history, but I think someone who doesn’t have enough prominence and who most [...]

The twenty-third of April is traditionally the feast day of Saint George. Saint George was a Christian from Anatolia, then a Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire but now part of Turkey. He is the patron saint of many countries, but veneration of him in England goes back at least to the ninth century, the [...]