Nick Maxwell In June 1823, six months after being ousted from government, Bernardo O’Higgins seriously thought about going into exile in Ireland. He had been under house arrest for six months at Valparaiso, Chile’s main port city, 60 miles west of Santiago, the capital. The new government had just given him permission to leave the country. He … Read more
July 5 1812 Frederick Edward Maning, adventurer and naturalised Maori, born in Johnville, Co. Dublin. 6 1939 Mary Peters, Olympic gold medal-winner in the pentathlon (Munich, 1972), born in Halewood, Lancashire. 5 1922 Cathal Brugha (47) was mortally wounded fighting on the republican side against Free State forces in Dublin’s O’Connell Street … Read more
Between 1641 and 1653 Ireland suffered a demographic collapse of staggering proportions. Over a quarter of the population perished as a result of endemic warfare, famine and disease, including the last major outbreak of plague in the country. The architect of the English reconquest of the island, Oliver Cromwell, described Ireland as ‘a clean paper’, … Read more
Across 1 Spanish galleon that ran aground off Lacada Point, Co. Antrim, in 1588 (6). 5 Fanny ———, Russian political revolutionary and an attempted assassin of Vladimir Lenin (6). 10 He was the last Anglo-Saxon archbishop of Canterbury (7). 11 Operation Rolling ———-, name given to sustained United States aerial bombardment campaign during the Vietnam … Read more
So unpalatable and poisonous is the original potato that anthropologists continue to puzzle over why anyone considered it a possible food in the first place. But over 8,000 years ago someone began experimenting with this unfriendly tuber (the potato is not a root at all but a tuber, a swollen underground stem). While various species … Read more