“We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones, We turned the dusty drill: We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns, And sweated on the mill: But in the heart of every man Terror was lying still.” These are the words of famed master of the pen, Oscar Wilde, in his Ballad of Reading Gaol, referencing his time spent at […]

1,500 kilometres southeast of Moscow, sprawling over the rugged steppes of Kazakhstan, lies Baikonur Cosmodrome, the world’s first gateway to space. It is from this hallowed ground that Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, and Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, blasted off on their historic missions – and a long time primary gateway to the International Space Station. […]

On December 8, 1941, the day after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour, the United States declared war on the Empire of Japan. Three days later on December 11, Japan’s ally Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. This was to prove a major strategic blunder for the Nazis, for not only was the United States the greatest industrial […]

In the first episode of the AppleTV series For All Mankind, the people of the world gather around their television sets in the summer of 1969 and watch in awe as the first human being sets foot on the moon. But in this reality, that human being is not NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong but Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, and his […]

When thinking about the middle ages, chances are that among the many images popping into your mind there stands a noble knight. Now, there are a variety of myths about what it was like to be a knight during medieval times, not just spread by Hollywood, but even by the contemporary legends during medieval times themselves- in both featuring widespread […]

On September 15, 1935, the Reichstag or parliament of the German Third Reich passed the infamous Nuremberg Laws. Comprising the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Reich Citizenship Law, these edicts forbade intermarriage or premarital sex between Aryans and non-Aryans – namely Jews and Roma – categorized people according to ancestry, and denied full […]

On July 20, 1969, the whole world gathered around their flickering television sets and watched in awe as astronaut Neil Armstrong who, if not for someone secretly slipping his very late application to the astronaut program into the pile wouldn’t have even been there (more on this in the Bonus Facts later), climbed down the leg of a strange, spidery […]

A revival of the fantasy genre in recent years has also brought about a revival of historical fiction set in the Middle Ages. With an endless array of titles, we are sure that you can easily visualise scenes from some Hollywood, TV or streaming service production, in which mounted knights charge at a line of terrified spearmen, tattooed Vikings pillage […]

Living with the Animals While modern humans have existed for at least a few hundred thousands years, we didn’t really start massively progressing from our earliest ancestors until we began forming large and very complex societies after transitioning away from small hunter-gather groups for various reasons. Critical to all this being able to happen was creating sets of rules which […]

On the morning of Thursday, December 17, 1903, two brothers stood on a windswept beach outside Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and prepared to make history. After winning a simple coin toss, one of the brothers climbed into a strange wood-and-canvas craft dubbed the Flyer. With a clatter and a whir the twin propellers spun up to a blur, and a […]