Pellagra is a disease of which most people have never heard. It is understood today, and treatment is straightforward; in fact, nobody needs to suffer form it at all. But it deserves a mention as a historical footnote because of what it did to Europe, and as an interesting study in how legends are formed.
Unpicking our ancient past is a nigh-impossible challenge. Piecing together who we are and where we came from has been likened to sifting sand through a screen, trying to find the odd grain which might offer another clue. For the truth is history is mostly lost. Almost everything of what we were simply doesn’t survive,
The Tasmanian Tiger is one of the most famous extinct animals. Also known as the thylacine, it survived well into the modern era and we even have film footage of a living example. Sadly this footage was of the last tiger, which died in captivity on the 7th September 1936 in Hobart Zoo on the
HMS Trooper was born into the heart of conflict. Laid down in 1940 and launched in 1942, she was thrown into the heart of the Second World War and the Battle for the Mediterranean. Her career was a short lived but eventful. In little over a year she sank an enemy submarine, the Italian Pietro
‘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