Gaius Octavius was the nephew of Julius Caesar, and his heir apparent, when the latter was brutally murdered by conspirators on the Ides of March, 44BC. At the time, Octavian (as he was then known) was twenty years old, and studying in Greece. Within 18 months, the young man had maneuvered himself into becoming one […]
Save it from what, exactly? Former RTE reporter Charlie Bird has made an impassioned plea about the future of the national broadcaster, saying it is time people ‘got up off their backsides’ to highlight its precarious state. He was commenting after the publication of a briefing document to Catherine Martin, the Minister for Media, which […]
Anne Applebaum is one of the world’s most distinguished historians. Gulag: A History is a seminal work, and Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine is an essential addition to our understanding of the Holodomor (I actually emailed back and forth with her a few times trying to secure an interview when it was released back in 2017.) Thus, I […]
On March 21st, 1612, a young girl called Alizon Device encountered a merchant called John Law, from Halifax, on the road to Pendle. She begged him to sell her some pins, but he refused, because she did not have the money. Privately, she cursed him. As luck would have it, within a few minutes, he […]
Bernard-Henri Lévy believes that our response is diminishing our humanity. Earlier this year the coronavirus pandemic caught Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s rock-star public intellectual, overseas. He had been reporting on the plight of Lesbos, the Aegean island crowded with refugees from Syria, and then of Bangladesh, which was attempting to cope not only with Covid-19 but […]
An Irish force led by Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill ambushed Sir Conyers Clifford and his men though a pass in the Curlew mountains near the town of Boyle in Roscommon.
J. Thomas Schipp and Abraham Smith were lynched in Indiana, on this day, August 7th, 1930. To date, they are the last known victims of lynching in the United States. Arrested on suspicion of murder, rape, and robbery the night before, Schipp and Smith were taken from their jail cells by an angry, all-white mob, […]
The Holy Roman Empire, founded in the 700’s, was formally dissolved on this day in 1806 by the Austrian Emperor Francis II. It had dominated European politics for a thousand years. The Empire was founded by the Carolingian dynasty of Charlemagne. In modern terms, it was not really an Empire at all, but a federation. […]
Have you ever heard the phrase “lose the battle but win the war”? The opposite happened to the Roman triumvir Mark Antony on this day in 30BC. Having been defeated at the Battle of Actium, Anthony and Cleopatra retreated to Alexandria, which was soon besieged by the forces of Octavian. For the whole month of […]
More than eighty complaints, would you believe, led to the ad being banned. If you haven’t had the chance to see it, here’s the scandalous tampon ad that the advertising authority of Ireland don’t want you to see: Is it a bit crude? Sure. But it’s hardly an advert for some kind of sexual debauchery, […]
By July 29th, 1848, most of Ireland had been truly devastated by the Great starvation. Outside of Ireland, Europe was being convulsed with revolutions. In France, King Louis-Philippe was overthrown, to make way for the second republic. Revolutions seeking the vote, and liberalisation, broke out in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, and elsewhere. Inspired by these […]
The British statesman, Thomas Cromwell, was beheaded on this day in 1540. It was a messy affair – the executioner was drunk (some say, because Cromwell’s enemies spiked his drink to make the execution worse) and it took three swings of the axe to remove Cromwell’s head. It was a spectacular fall from grace: Cromwell […]