Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2017 i History Extra

“King John was one of England’s least popular monarchs and there must have been many people during his reign who wished to see him dead. But did one of them take the ultimate step and assassinate the king, as a rumour that swept 13th-century Europe suggests? In this issue’s cover feature on page 20, Dr Laura Ashe investigates this allegation and considers what the story can tell us about medieval attitudes towards kingship. Another dramatic tale we are exploring this month is the 1940 evacuation of Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk. This iconic moment in Britain’s Second World War story is the subject of a major new historical blockbuster starring the likes of Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance and Kenneth Branagh. On page 50, Dr Tim Benbow narrates the…

Bernard-René de Launay was not a bad man. Born in 1740, he had spent much of his career in the French Guards, stationed in Paris, before becoming, like his father before him, the governor of the vast state prison in the centre of the capital. Contrary to what was claimed in political pamphlets of the day, the Bastille was not really such a terrible place. De Launay himself had a reputation as a reasonably considerate gaoler, and far from being stuffed with political dissidents, the Bastille was actually pretty empty. On the morning of 14 July 1789, in fact, de Launay was in charge of only seven prisoners – four forgers, two madmen and a dissolute aristocrat. To the Paris mob, however, the Bastille was a time-honoured symbol of royal…

“Oppenheimer’s words have become synonymous with that momentous and unworldly event in the normal serenity of the desert. The scientists standing there that morning were aware of the destructive power that they were unleashing upon the world, but they were probably unaware of how their creation would irrevocably alter the landscape of warfare and international relations. The arms race for a nuclear weapon was clear from the outset. Begun out of a fear that Nazi Germany would build the atomic bomb first, the Manhattan Project would be run in utmost secrecy. Yet the fact that such a programme existed was not a mystery to rival leaders, even if its detail was. The politics of the bomb were as important as its scientific innovation and military potential. With the exception of…

The University of Manchester has teamed up with the National Trust to help people explore Tudor attitudes to sleep. The ‘How We Used to Sleep’ project at Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire sees visitors walk through installations that replicate a journey through a night’s slumber in the 16th century. The partnership is the result of a recent study by Dr Sasha Handley, senior lecturer in early modern history at the University of Manchester, who has been exploring the relationship between the culture and the quality of sleep in the early modern period. “Our ancestors went to great lengths to sleep well,” says Handley, who has published her findings in Sleep in Early Modern England (Yale UP, 2016). “They believed that well-regulated sleeping patterns held the key to long-term physical and…

Falkirk Herald 16 December 1939 In all his 90 years, Sir John Ambrose Fleming, inventor of the thermionic valve, had never had to deal with nosey journalists. He had been born in the middle of the Victorian era and developed a passion for engineering at a young age. His creation of the thermionic valve revolutionised wireless telegraphy and made modern broadcasting possible. Almost a century after his birth, Fleming still maintained his love of invention. In December 1939, when the Falkirk Herald ran with news of Fleming’s new “Spy Proof Invention”, the Second World War had just broken out. Fleming had turned his mind to a system that permitted “the despatch of light signals which can be received only by those in possession of an instrument which renders them decodable”,…

Animal invasion In How the Victorians Ruined the World (April), Kat Arney describes how grey squirrels invaded the UK, decimating the numbers of native red squirrels. Well, my great-great-great grandmother Elizabeth Lydia Lind was ahead of her time. Her diary entry for 29 September 1800 reads: “Mrs Merrill gave me grey American squirrel.” And the note for 2 April 1809 records that “the grey American squirrel, which Mrs Merrill had given us in 1800, died”. In 1800, Dr and Mrs Lind were living at Haslar, where he was a physician at the naval hospital. It was lucky the squirrel died before the family settled on the Isle of Wight, as the island is one of the few places where red squirrels still thrive. Other less controversial gifts recorded in Mrs…

1 Children of “hard flesh” Wrenched from their homes at the age of seven, Sparta’s boys were battle-ready by 20 The ancient Greek city of Sparta was a military superpower, and its children were enveloped within this fighting ethos from a very early age. Soon after birth, a council of inspectors would judge a male infant’s physical attributes; if he was deemed unfit, the baby would most likely be abandoned on a nearby hillside. At the age of seven, Spartan boys were removed from their parents’ homes and conscripted into the ‘agoge’, a military training scheme. The first-century AD Roman historian Plutarch detailed their regime: “Their training was calculated to make them obey commands well, endure hardships and conquer in battle… When they were 12 years old, they no longer…

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney Jonathan Cape, 352 pages, £20 Coursing across the globe in successive waves 100 years ago, the invisible H1N1 influenza virus infected one in every three people. While the First World War was directly responsible for 17 million deaths, its massive migrations of troops under cramped, insanitary conditions fostered an illness that killed between 40 and 100 million worldwide. In Pale Rider, Laura Spinney provides a vivid account of the medical mysteries surrounding this exceptionally lethal disease and its long-term consequences. The main fascination of her wonderfully absorbing book lies in its international comparisons, reinforced by harrowing narratives of personal experiences. Where you lived made an enormous difference to your chance of survival: in parts…

The Moor’s Last Stand: How Seven Centuries of Muslim Rule in Spain Came to an End by Elizabeth Drayson Profile Books, 224 pages, £17.99 The year 1492 marked a turning point in Spanish history; it was the year that Granada, the last remaining Muslim state in the Iberian peninsula, was captured following 10 years of war. In this excellent book, Elizabeth Drayson focuses on the event, paying particular attention to the enigmatic emir Ab ŗ ‘Abd All Ɨ h Muhammad. Better known to modern historians as Boabdil, the last ruler of the Nasrid dynasty had the dubious privilege of handing the keys of Granada over to the victorious Catholic monarchs. Our knowledge of Boabdil’s life is derived from scarce Muslim and Christian sources, but Drayson expertly uses the limited evidence…

Ulverton Adam Thorpe (1992) Thorpe invents a West Country village and then, through 12 very different narratives, peoples it with individuals from centuries past. From a 17th-century vicar delivering a sermon to his flock, to a 19th-century labourer speaking in rich dialect, the voices of Ulverton are brilliantly brought to life. Each chapter works as an individual story, but they weave together to form the longer history of the village across 300 years. London Edward Rutherfurd (1997) Since he debuted with Sarum in 1987, Rutherfurd has published a number of epic novels that trace the histories of cities and countries. In this book, he begins in Roman London, then, through 800 pages and nearly two millennia, charts the intertwined fortunes of six families living and working in the country’s capital.…

Robert Redford’s the American West TV History From Tuesday 27 June Executive-produced by a man who famously played the Sundance Kid, this eight-part docudrama chronicles life out west in the three decades that followed the American Civil War. Don’t expect too many tales of day-today life on ranches – the series promises shoot-’em-up tales of such figures as Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and George Custer. Adding some glitter to the heat and dust, famous film cowboys, including James Caan, Kiefer Sutherland and Kris Kristofferson, add their perspectives.…

The current series of In Our Time (BBC Radio 4) is coming to an end, with just two more history-related discussions with Melvyn Bragg and his expert guests slated. On Thursday 22 June, the subject is Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse. On Thursday 29 June, the discussion centres on Plato’s Republic. Rather less serious is the continuing Paul Sinha’s History Revision (Thursday 22 June), in which the comedian and quizzer relates historical stories “that we have forgotten in our onward march of progress”. On Yesterday, Royal Murder Mysteries (Tuesday 27 June) continues. It includes an episode about the now little-remembered Prince Albert Victor, Edward VII’s eldest son and a young man his grandmother, Queen Victoria, saw as “dissipated”. There’s more royal history in a re-run of Prince John:…

Lost at sea EXHIBITION Death in the Ice: The Shocking Story of Franklin’s Final Expedition National Maritime Museum, Greenwich 14 July–7 Jan 2018 - 020 8312 6608 (booking line) • rmg.co.uk On 19 May 1845 Sir John Franklin and his 128-man crew, aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, set sail with the hope of traversing the whole of the North-West Passage – a navigable channel that was believed to connect the North Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, providing a trade route with Asia. It was the biggest expedition that Britain had ever sent to the Arctic region but, after 1847, nothing more was ever heard from the men again, despite a series of rescue missions. It wasn’t until 2014 that the wreck of HMS Erebus was found, followed in 2016…

ST MARY REDCLIFFE Once described by Elizabeth I as “the fairest, goodliest and most famous parish church in England”, Bristol’s St Mary Redcliffe is one of our finest churches: a Grade I listed building, a masterpiece of Gothic architecture and a treasure of international importance. Rich in history, it has associations with, among others, John Cabot, William Penn, Thomas Chatterton and William Hogarth. 0117 231 0060 www.stmaryredcliffe.co.uk ST. PANCRAS OLD CHURCH Located in central London, St Pancras Old Church is believed to have been a site of Christian worship since the 4th century. The current grade II* listed church is a living testament to the development of the site since medieval times. The churchyard likewise contains numerous listed monuments. The church is open daily from 9am to 5pm.…

Q What was the ‘other’ gunpowder plot of 1657? O Adamberry, Gibraltar A In January 1657 a group of plotters planned to set fire to Whitehall Palace by laying a “strange composition of combustible stuff, and two lighted matches” in the chapel. The aim was to kill the lord protector, Oliver Cromwell. Led by the ex-Levellers Edward Sexby and Miles Sindercombe, the plot was backed by Spanish funds and was linked to a potential Leveller/ royalist invasion. Silus Titus, a royalist who became involved, thought the plot “required too much time, too many persons, and was subject to too many accidents to be carried on with any reasonable hopes that it should succeed”. Yet John Thurloe, Cromwell’s spymaster, who had infiltrated the plan, considered it genuine and in parliament revealed…

Pork cake While it may not have the most appetising name, pork cake is a surprisingly tasty sweet treat. This dense fruitcake, held together by pork fat, was a favourite of budget-conscious 19th-century Americans. One 1866 recipe called it “a most delightful cake made by the use of pork, which saves the expense of butter, eggs and milk”. Another suggested it was “not inferior to the richest fruit cake” while only costing half the price. Somewhat unexpectedly, the humble cake also appears in a 1942 cookbook by Wallis Simpson. The Duchess of Windsor listed it alongside gumbo and pickled oysters as one of her favourite southern dishes. If you can forgive its unappealing preparation, the cake is easy to make, and tastes similar to an average fruitcake. However, its unusual…

Laura Ashe King John is famous for being a truly terrible king – and his people thought so at the time. But the fact that medieval people believed they had the right to judge their king would change history. • Laura asks if ‘Bad’ King John was murdered on page 20 Clare Mulley These women were not just small cogs in a machine doing what was expected of them. They made great efforts not just to work, but to lead the way in male-dominated industries. • Clare talks about her new book on two women who flew for the Nazis on page 65 James Evans Why did so many people leave 17th-century England for North America? Both Bismarck and Churchill thought the fact that they did was the most important…

What can we glean from the DNA of the Mary Rose sailors? A full DNA analysis can provide a great deal of information about an individual – their physical characteristics and lineage. But this study has the much more limited goals of assigning the bones to form complete skeletons of sailors for study and display. It may also be possible to use some of this data to compare ancestral lineages of the crew. Can you give us an example of what you’ve discovered so far? We have already published our findings from the genetic analysis of the remains of a dog found on the ship. We were able to determine its coat colour, gender and breed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was a terrier, most closely related to…

Is it ever acceptable for dramas to alter historical events or characters to make them more engaging to audiences? @b_hawk It’s not only acceptable but also inevitable, probably necessary. We’ve been doing it for hundreds of years, every time we tell stories @LeeDonaghy They shouldn’t show things which are provably false or wrong, but filling in the blanks – if done sensitively and sensibly – is fine @alcibiadesisace Absolutely as this could stimulate engagement and interest / research. Sometimes a hook is needed to inspire people! @OPR_71 Reality always overcomes fantasy. Engaging with modern audiences is a mere excuse – altering events only proves lack of ability to expose history Julie Mcguire Is history ever 100% accurate? Historians have to rely on documents and accounts made by people who may…

James McCudden James joined the Royal Engineers as a boy bugler in 1910. In 1913, he transferred into the Royal Flying Corps as a mechanic. He qualified as a pilot in 1916, and shot down his first aircraft in September. He became a 2nd lieutenant at the end of that year. In July 1917, James McCudden returned to active service in France, flying the Sopwith Pup Scout with 66 Squadron. The Pup was a beautiful aircraft to fly, but lacked power and had only one Vickers machine gun – in contrast to the two machine guns carried by the German Albatros. McCudden flung himself into action, but on 26 July he had a narrow escape over the Ypres Salient while patrolling with squadron commander Major Henderson. “We crossed the lines…

1 Did Hitler let the British get away? The German order of 23 May to halt the advancing panzers has led to a claim that Hitler deliberately allowed the British to escape – the idea being that avoiding humiliation would make them more willing to accept a peace deal that would free him to turn his attention to the east. This is utter nonsense. First, it does not make sense. Capturing most of the trained strength of the British Army would have provided a weighty bargaining chip. Second, the claim does not reflect what happened: only one of the two advancing German armies halted (and only for two days, pushing on when it became clear that an evacuation might be under way). The other pressed on and the Luftwaffe continued…

Out of the Shadow of a Giant by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin William Collins, 384 pages, £25 Sir Isaac Newton’s well-known protestation that he merely stood “on the shoulders of giants” is regarded as a statement of modesty that confirms his place – as though genius were not enough – in the pantheon of British science. What’s less well known is that Newton’s self-description came in a letter to his contemporary and sometime rival Robert Hooke – a short man who was sensitive about his height. For John and Mary Gribbin, this is grist to the argument that Newton was a “known liar” who stole the science of Hooke and misappropriated the respect of a nation with his cooked-up tale of the falling apple. In Out of the Shadow…

The Lives of Tudor Women by Elizabeth Norton Head of Zeus, 416 pages, £9.99 The Tudors believed that life could be divided into phases, as articulated in As You Like It. Shakespeare termed it the Seven Ages of Man and focused upon the male professions: schoolboy, soldier, justice of the peace, etc. This was typical of an age in which women were relegated to the status of second-class citizens – with one or two notable (royal) exceptions. In her latest book, Elizabeth Norton tries to redress the balance by taking us through the seven phases of a Tudor woman’s life. Drawing on examples such as Elizabeth of York, Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I, she also explores a range of more obscure – but no less fascinating – women, from heretics…

“James is ever so much funnier – and more wicked – than you think” Innocents Abroad RADIO Radio 4, scheduled for 20 July As Professor Sarah Churchwell acknowledges, American émigré novelist Henry James (1843–1916) has a reputation as a “difficult” and “serious” writer. “It all sounds very intimidating and joyless, when the experience of reading him is anything but,” she says. As part of a Radio 4 season that also includes dramatisations of three of James’s early works, including The Portrait of a Lady, Churchwell’s documentary seeks to rehabilitate the novelist for modern audiences. The Trump era is an especially apposite moment to do this because it was James who invented the idea of clashes between the ‘old world’ and the ‘new world’, often seen through the prism of American…

On an unhurried, sunny spring afternoon, the Shropshire village of Ironbridge resembles a rural idyll barely touched by the industrial world. The river Severn slips gently by, its banks full and verdant, while daytrippers divide their time between its ice-cream parlours and its excellent secondhand bookshop. Across the road, a gaggle of French schoolchildren hold up their phones to take pictures of the structure that gave both the village and the gorge its name. Built in 1779, the bridge whose gentle parabola elegantly spans the river is a clue to the gorge’s industrial past. This was the world’s first cast-iron bridge, one forged just a mile or so away at the large ironworks at Coalbrookdale. The bridge isn’t the only clue to a less idyllic past. Industrial archaeology is present…

Hanoi traffic never stops. The drivers whizz along on motorbikes of various makes and sizes, often carrying their entire families with them. And the Vietnamese navigate their history like they navigate their streets – with a stunning casualness that belies the weight of all they carry around with them. Vietnam is a beautiful, challenging country that many have loved, and more have coveted, over the centuries. I spent a month largely hopping among some of its major cities. One trip is simply not enough – especially for history fans. I was first struck by how Hanoi (Vietnam’s capital) retains some of the desirable elements of French culture, almost as a form of reverse colonisation. Though independence was formally granted here in 1954, hotel restaurants routinely serve up fragrant baguettes and…

It was almost 5.30am on 16 July 1945, in the dawn heat of the New Mexico desert, when the bomb exploded. “I was staring straight ahead with my open left eye covered by a welder’s glass and my right eye remaining open and uncovered,” recalled one observer, Ralph Carlisle Smith, who was watching from a nearby hilltop. “Suddenly, my right eye was blinded by a light which appeared instantaneously all about without any build up of intensity. My left eye could see the ball of fire start up like a tremendous bubble… It turned yellow, then red, and then beautiful purple.” There was, he remembered, a loud cheer from the other watchers. Then one of the scientists said softly: “That was at least 5,000 tons and probably a lot more.”…

1 His coffin is worth over £1m Tutankhamun was buried in three coffins – each nesting inside another. The innermost coffin was made from thick sheets of beaten gold. If scrapped today, it would be worth in excess of £1m. 2 His original name was not Tutankhamun The pharoah’s original name was Tutankhaten, in honour of Aten, the sun god worshipped by his parents. The young pharaoh eventually changed his religion and began worshipping Amun, the king of the gods, and changed his name to Tutankhamun. 3 His royal tomb is the smallest in the Valley of the Kings The fashion for huge pyramids had ended by Tutankhamun’s reign. These were replaced by decorative rock-cut tombs tunnelled into the Valley of the Kings. Tutankhamun’s tomb is small and cramped, leading…

Hugo Chavez cast politics as a battle between ‘the people’ and a rapacious elite. But ‘Chavismo’ always had an authoritarian element ALEJANDRO VELASCO In the 1970s, where most of the region languished under coups, military rule, civil war and unrest, Venezuela seemed an island of democratic strength, wealth and social peace. Political scientists said it was the product of enlightened statesmen who, after ousting Venezuela’s last dictatorship in 1958 and defeating a Marxist insurgency in 1968, built strong, broadly representative institutions and parties that alternated in power. Economists said it was the blessing of oil riches that generated consensus rather than conflict. By the early 1990s, when oil prices had dropped precipitously, the ‘exceptionalist’ argument collapsed under the weight of the very things Venezuela was supposed to have overcome –…

 “In 1799, Sir Harford Brydges, the British Resident in Baghdad, sent a fascinating piece of intelligence to London about a new sect in Arabia, the ‘True Muslims’, whose founder Muhammad ibn Wahhab had died seven years before. Born in 1703, Wahhab came from Najd in the heart of Arabia. After study at Medina and 12 years’ travel and study in Iraq, he returned to launch a puritanical reform of Islam aimed against popular piety, levelling saints’ tombs and cutting down sacred trees. He ordered the stoning of adulterous women, and preached jihad against unbelievers – Shia Muslims among them. “Hardline Salafists reject 1,400 years of Muslim thought” That story came to mind as the tragic events unfolded recently in my home town, Manchester. The world of Islam is vast and…

In October 1216 the king of England, travelling across country with what remained of his followers, stopped for a night’s rest at the abbey of Swineshead, deep in the Lincolnshire Fens. It had been hard going and he’d lost half of his baggage train in the treacherous fenland. The abbey was thrown into disarray by his arrival. Its residents scrambled to find accommodation and food for the king and his men, painfully aware that John brought civil war to their doorstep. At the same time as the king demanded hospitality, Louis of France – attempting to seize John’s kingdom at the head of a determined force of rebel English barons – was laying siege to Dover Castle. The French prince had already received the submission of London and Winchester, and…

Snapshots of the Cold War 1 Soviet troops start to withdraw from Afghanistan – ‘Moscow’s Vietnam’ – in spring 1988, following the Geneva Accords with the USA 2 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev start talking about bilateral nuclear arms reductions in Geneva, November 1985 3 By 1967, opposition to the Vietnam War and the Draft was mounting in America 4 West Berliners wave to those on the other side of the then-rudimentary Berlin Wall, 1961 5 A statue of Soviet secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, a potent symbol of Stalinism, is removed from Lubyanka Square, Moscow in August 1991 6 Henry Kissinger shakes hands with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho as the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 effectively end US involvement in the war In 1961, the Berlin Wall…

Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth by Paul Ham Doubleday, 592 pages, £25  One hundred years ago, in July 1917, heralded by the usual prolonged preparatory artillery barrage, British and imperial forces launched a major offensive over the blasted and waterlogged Flanders fields around the shattered town of Ypres. For Ham, the battle surpasses even the Somme in the futility of lives thrown away for pitifully small gains The third battle of Ypres –commonly known, from its final phase, as Passchendaele – turned into a desperate slog in which men and their pack animals drowned in glutinous mud as they struggled not only against the German enemy, but also against the cruel weather, which poured relentless rain from the skies. The ‘big push’ on the Somme the previous year had turned…

Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane by James Delbourgo Allen Lane, 544 pages, £25  In this lively biography, James Delbourgo unearths the motives that drove Britain’s most successful collector, and explores the contexts that shaped him. Delbourgo thoroughly investigates Sloane’s links with the brutality of the slave trade Hans Sloane’s name remains embedded in London geography – in Sloane Square, for example – but he has mostly vanished from modern view in “a curious case of fame and amnesia combined”. Such neglect, Delbourgo argues, stems from the unusual diversity of Sloane’s interests: as a result, both the man and his collections baffled later attempts to simplify and categorise. We first meet Sloane in his home town of Killyleagh, County Down; an impressionable young man newly captivated…

What would a 14th-century man make of the centuries that followed? This is the intriguing question that Ian Mortimer (author of The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England) tries to answer in The Outcasts of Time, the first novel he’s published under his own name. In 1348, England is in the grip of the Black Death. Brothers John, a stonemason, and William, a wool merchant, are struggling to make their way back to the West Country town they call home. Men, women and children are dying all around them, and it soon becomes clear that the brothers are infected with the plague, too. An enigmatic, disembodied voice offers them a choice: they can continue their doomed journey, or lose the symptoms of the plague, travel forward 99 years on each…

Back to Work: Confectioners TV BBC Two Scheduled for July In the Tudor and Stuart eras, eating sugary food was a pleasure reserved for the richest, such was the cost of a commodity that had to be imported. The story of how we got from there to an era when we’re told we eat too much sugar is the subject of a new living history series. Presented by food historian Dr Annie Gray and Emma Dabiri from SOAS, University of London, the series also follows four skilled confectioners as they recreate the recipes of yesteryear. Along the way, among other highlights, the quartet have to get to grips with ‘open arse’ fruit.…

Guerilla DVD (Spirit Entertainment Ltd, £14.99) The history of British ‘black power’ activism has long been under the radar. Guerilla, a six-part drama written by John Ridley (12 Years a Slave), seeks to redress this. Set in 1971, it tells the story of what might have happened had British activists taken up arms. The decision of Jas (Freida Pinto), Marcus (Babou Ceesay) and others to turn to the gun and the bomb is shown in the context of violent times – and of ingrained racism within British society that found expression in the way the 1971 Immigration Act favoured white Commonwealth immigrants. Community leader Kent (Idris Elba) articulates the case for peaceful campaigning. For all that the focus here is largely on the activists, the series is structured in key…

1 Clearwell Caves CLEARWELL, FOREST OF DEAN Where iron was mined for millennia Iron ore has been mined at Clearwell Caves for thousands of years and you can glimpse that history at what is now a working museum. Nine large caverns are open to visitors and there are also several displays on the history and geology of the area. clearwellcaves.com 2 Cleveland Ironstone Mining Museum SKINNINGROVE, NORTH YORKSHIRE Where the life of a miner is revealed In the 19th century the Tees Valley was home to 83 iron mines, the first of which was established at Skinningrove in 1848. Visitors experience what life was like for miners as they extracted iron ore that would be used across the world, including in the Sydney Harbour Bridge. ironstonemuseum.co.uk 3 Blaenavon Ironworks BLAENAVON,…

BEST TIME TO GO Spring and autumn are the most popular times to visit among western tourists, as temperatures are pleasant and rainfall is much lighter. GETTING THERE Vietnam Airlines offers direct flights from London Heathrow to Hanoi Noi Bai (it takes around 12 hours, so you’ll have plenty of time to study your phrasebook!), but many of Vietnam’s major cities have airports. WHAT TO PACK It makes sense to get a month-long tourist Visa – with so much to see, you won’t want a shorter stay. A filtered face mask is also recommended, especially if you’re planning to be out doing active things or riding on a motorbike – the atmosphere can get heavy. WHAT TO BRING BACK Before leaving the UK, choose one of your favourite outfits to…

1. BLARNEY CASTLE Situated 8 km from Cork City, this historic castle is most famous for its stone, which has the traditional power of conferring eloquence on all who kiss it. info@blarneycastle.ie | 00 353 21 438 5252 2. THE LIBRARY AND MUSEUM OF FREEMASONRY Visit our exhibition at Freemasons’ Hall, London to discover three centuries of English freemasonry and explore how modern freemasonry fits into today’s world. libmus@freemasonry.london.museum 3. THE SPRING ARTS & HERITAGE CENTRE One of the UK’s few integrated arts and heritage centres. Visit us to explore our local history museum, watch a performance, view our exhibitions and relax in our café. thespring.co.uk | 023 9247 2700 4. CHILLINGHAM CASTLE Grade 1 Star Listed Chillingham Castle, with its fine rooms, gardens, lakes, fountains and tea room is a 12th…

1. Who (left) was deposed in the Rum Rebellion of 1808? 2. What do peers of the realm traditionally do on their first visit to Oakham Castle in Rutland? 3. Who left Rhodes in 1522 and arrived in Malta in 1530? 4. What did Massachusetts governor Eldridge Gerry controversially authorise in 1812? 5. Who were the Petroleuses? 6. Whose official residence is this? QUIZ ANSWERS 1. William Bligh, the governor of New South Wales and former captain of HMS Bounty. 2. Present it with a horseshoe. 3. The Knights of St John. 4. An alteration of the state’s electoral boundaries, hence ‘gerrymandering’. 5. Women who were (wrongly) believed to have burned down public buildings during the last days of the Paris Commune in 1871. 6. The Lord Warden of the…

A brilliant military leader who inspired great loyalty among his troops, Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, forced advancing Germanic tribes back after building a bridge over the Rhine river, and invaded Britain twice. In 49 BC, his army crossed the Rubicon river to take Rome and, following campaigns in Asia Minor, Africa and Spain, he governed the city as a dictator. After implementing a number of wide-ranging reforms, including the introduction of the Julian calendar, Caesar was assassinated by Brutus and Cassius on the Ides (15th) of March, 44 BC. When did you first hear about Julius Caesar? My elder brother used to read me the Asterix books as a kid and I remember one of those stories was about Asterix and Caesar, so I must’ve been aware of him by…