Sir,—Richard Pine’s letter (HI 30.5, Sept./Oct. 2022), responding to my article (HI 30.4, July/Aug. 2022, ‘Bram Stoker’s “Great Game”?’), usefully summarises the nineteenth-century history of the term ‘the Great Game’—a term used by British officials to refer to the competition between Britain and Russia for supremacy in Central Asia. The elaboration of this history of … Read more
Sir,—Tom Carew asks (HI 30.6, Nov./Dec. 2022, Letters) whether Canadians regard the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) as a military force. It was a military force and would still be so regarded by many First Nations communities. These indigenous people were brutally rounded up and forced out of their homes and homelands by the RCMP. … Read more
Sir,—Simon Kingston of the West Cork History Festival has made a disturbing statement in a History Ireland Hedge School (https://historyireland.com/hedge-schools/) on the TG4 documentary Marú in Iarthar Chorcaí (Murder in West Cork). He says: ‘At the History Festival which we’ve been running for six years we’ve encountered extraordinarily vitriolic behaviour from a very small minority, … Read more
‘A WALL FOR ALL’ At the annual Bloody Sunday Festival in Derry, a braille translation has been added to the Free Derry Wall. The signage was unveiled by Children in Crossfire founder Richard Moore, who was blinded by a rubber bullet at the age of ten in 1972. To Moore, the sign is about ‘raising … Read more
BY AODHÁN CREALEY MARCH 06/1845 Amongst the many theories on what inspired the character Dracula is that Bram Stoker was greatly influenced by his older brother’s medical textbooks relating to rare and unusual diseases, one of which was a hereditary blood disorder called porphyria. Sufferers of this condition would have extreme sensitivity to light and … Read more