Bianca Maria Visconti, Duchess of Milan
1 week ago
Tory Historian has many pleasant and not so pleasant memories of the great Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. The latest Alumni magazine does, indeed, have an article on the subject complete with a time line but neither appears to be on the website. Suffice it to say that the library grew out of a private collection of books, formed by Sir Edward Allen Brotherton, later Lord Brotherton...
June 22, 1941 - Germany invades the Soviet Union, disregarding the infamous Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Of course, it is important to recall that what was actually being invaded in those first days was eastern Poland that had been the USSR's portion of the de...
Tory Historian, being the offspring of a lexicographer, finds dictionaries almost as exciting as maps. (see previous postings passim) Therefore, the news that the grand project of creating a dictionary of the Akkadian language, last spoken in Mesopotamia a couple of millennia ago, has been completed.The dictionary was put together by studying texts written on clay and stone tablets uncovered in ancient Mesopotamia, which sat between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers - the heartland of which was in modern-day Iraq, and also...
Tom Fort reviews an interesting new book, When in Rome, the story of the Eternal City through the eyes of visitors who wrote about it. Few visitors can rival the historian Edward Gibbon, who spent 18 weeks in Rome and wrote later in his Memoirs:It was at Rome, on the [fifteenth] of October[,] 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare[-]footed fryars were singing [V]espers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the [C]ity first started to my mind.Though there is...
Tory Historian managed to miss the Duke of Edinburgh's 90th birthday but can do no better than to link to an article by that excellent journalist, Ruth Dudley Edwards. It is mostly about the difference between the Duchess of Cambridge, a seemingly sensible, balanced individual on the one hand and the Princess of Wales (Princess Di, as she is known to the media) and the Duchess of York (Fergy, as she is known to the media). Both of these,...
June 6, 1...
