Wednesday, 11 March 2026

Fruit that is bred primarily for sweetness at the expense of complexity of flavour

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Gala is the apple that always seemed to me to encapsulate the unfortunate shift in recent decades towards fruit that is bred primarily for s...
Tuesday, 10 March 2026

England had been ruled by men whose competing priorities made an unstable compound

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The problem was that ever since Ireton and Pride had purged Parliament in 1649 to push through the trial and execution of the King, in which...
Monday, 9 March 2026

The rise of the newspapers was itself an aspect of the explosion in publishing which took place in the mid-seventeenth century

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The rise of the newspapers was itself an aspect of the explosion in publishing which took place in the mid-seventeenth century. In the year ...
Sunday, 8 March 2026

The wages of the Derbys’ uncompromising royalism were death, but they were not destitution

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The downfall of the nobility, even that part of it that had fought for Charles I, had never been the goal of the republican regime. The Comm...
Saturday, 7 March 2026

And that if his Doggs would not eate himm hee would eate him himselfe

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In interviewing informers Bradshaw [who presided over the trial of Charles I] was repeatedly confronted with the visceral fury that was felt...
Friday, 6 March 2026

Oliver Cromwell’s daughter, Mary, and her husband Lord Fauconberg ... were popular figures at the late Stuart courts

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Oliver Cromwell’s daughter, Mary, and her husband Lord Fauconberg, whose boisterous wedding party Oliver himself had hosted, were popular f...
Thursday, 5 March 2026

Put up with so much architecture they detested

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O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and pow...