Nick Maxwell ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’, was the advice given by the crusty old editor in the John Ford western The man who shot Liberty Valence. To a historian it may seem that this is the guiding principle behind the celebrations of the Titanic, history’s most successful disaster. The outline of its story … Read more
In recent months, coordinated public statements concerning Ireland’s looming decade of commemoration, uttered by Taoiseach Brian Cowen and British Prime Minister David Cameron, have referred to the need to acknowledge a ‘shared history’. After a century of conflict and compromise the ‘temporary’ solution of partition has become a fixture, and with it contradictory and oppositional … Read more
Before A history of the Irish working class, Hell or Connaught! The Cromwellian colonisation of Ireland (1975) and The Boyne Water (1976), Peter Berresford Ellis had published books on the histories of Wales and Scotland. In more recent years his historical work has focused on the ancient Celtic peoples—ancestors of the Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Manx, … Read more
May 2 1982 The Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano was torpedoed and sunk by the British submarine Conqueror some 30 miles outside the 200-mile ‘exclusion zone’ that Britain had declared around the Falkland Islands. Some 260 crewmen perished. 7 1812 Robert Browning, English poet and playwright, born in Camberwell, London. 8 1987 Eight … Read more