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. […]
The public wants somebody to pay for this mess, and that person must be someone they can identify with.
If there’s been a more significant political shift in my lifetime than the left’s attitude to big corporations, I don’t know what it is.
Pandering to your audience might be good for you, as a media outlet. But it’s almost always in the worst interests of the audience itself.
He joined the Gaelic league as he believed that the language must be preserved
One shudders to think of the national conversation that would presently be ongoing if the attacked migrants had been handing out leaflets in favour of more immigration, rather than in favour of more prayer.
Nobody wants to be the journalist who says “Dublin is a Kip”, only to see Justin Barrett, or someone only vaguely less awful, win a City Council seat on a “Dublin is a kip” platform.
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 […]
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 […]
By indulging her public suffering and despair, did we really help her? I’m not sure the answer to that question is “yes”.
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 […]
If they’d gotten away with doing this to him, the rest of us were next in line.