Prose and Passion

Some thoughts on Black Sea Coasts and conquests: from Pericles to Putin Neal Ascherson Vintage Paperback 2015 When I suggested writi...

I've seen a surprising increase in views of blog entries here. Between mid November and early December, views of similar entries (eg CB ...

It may just have been their bad luck, but the Scythians were there on the Pontic Steppe (north of the Black Sea) in the middle of the first ...

I’m currently reading the excellent family history memoir “House of Glass” by Hadley Freeman, about her grandmother and her siblings - a Jew...

Cello teacher Janet Tinbergen, who taught our young musician for more than 10 years, has passed away in December 2020, aged 75. I wrote an o...

last update: 15.1.2023 My grandmother Ruth had four grandparents like everybody else, but only 3 pairs of great-grandparents, as her grandm...

A little light relief for plague year two - there is a lot of research on the effects of caffeine, simply because it's easy to round up ...

I'm sharing some vintage photos in a new flickr album of family history with social context, i.e. no portraits, but people engaging in ...

#lostcities bonus episode: Hamborn When I was rounding up 10 cities which my ancestors inhabited between 1900 and 1970, it struck me that...

Some thoughts on Mercator: The man who mapped the planet Nicholas Crane Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2002 / Phoenix paperback 2003 The...

Plague Year(s) Bach Project , 14th month In March, I managed to memorise the first half of the gigue in D minor (38 bars out of 76) so I...

As I've been obsessing about old postcards for my #lostcities recently, I remembered this little treasure which isn't really from a...