‘Tis the season to be spooky! Grab your pumpkin and your best witch’s hat, break out the skeletons for your front lawn and hope nobody puts anything dodgy in your candy. Halloween is indeed one of the most popular holidays in the American calendar, a playful time of pranks and ghostly scares built upon the
Bronze Age Greece is seen as a golden age. This is Homer’s Greece, the Greece of the Iliad and the Trojan War, of city states and island kingdoms, of great heroes and gods and monsters. But it may surprise some to find that we actually know very little of this time. Once all the epic
The third Indiana Jones movie is arguably the best, and its climactic set piece features a wonder of the world. Known as the Khaznah el-Far’oun, or “treasury of the pharaoh” this rose red edifice carved into the rockface dates back to the 1st century AD. It has been known for some time that something lies
The office of Pope has historically always been a highly important one. Such a role was and is intensely political, with the Pope uniquely being able to influence foreign powers through their people and their faith. This power does not always attract the pious, and the history of the Vatican and the broader Catholic Church
Christopher Columbus is a divisive figure. In some households he is a hero, whereas others consider him much more controversial a figure. Even his final resting place has been the subject of fierce debate. The body of Columbus rests in Seville Cathedral in Spain, but also in the Dominican Republic. The problems arose because the
On 29 May 1953 Mount Everest was officially summited for the first time. The climbers, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, entered the history books for their achievement, something nobody had managed before. At least, that is what is believed. However there was another ascent, decades earlier, which may have achieved the impossible and reached the