He is usually portrayed as the bad guy of English history – and in Southern Ireland he is an unmitigated villain and mass-murderer. Recently, however, I have been taking around a group of Canadians who venerate the memory of Oliver Cromwell. When we went to Ely Cathedral we were shown a letter written by the Arise […]
Diary of a Tourist Guide:
Archives for May 2017
HOOVER BUILDING – FROM FACTORY TO FLATS
Coaches usually take one of three roads into/out of London – the M3, the M4 or the M40. I was coming back to London along the last recently and talked about football (soccer to our American visitors) as we passed Wembley Stadium and the Battle of Britain at RAF Northolt. Between the two I gave a mention to […]
PICCADILLY BY THE SEA
England’s two greatest artists were contemporaries born a year apart who lived much of their lives in London and were both inspired more by the natural world than the people who inhabited it. Beyond that they had little in common. JMW Turner (1775 – 1851), the son of a Covent Garden barber, led a bohemian […]
BETSY AND BONEY
Thomas Keneally’s latest novel Napoleon’s Last Island was inspired by coming across the story of Betsy Balcombe in his native Australia. It tells the story of the friendship between Napoleon and the young Betsy, daughter of the local agent for the East India Company on St Helena where Napoleon was exiled after his defeat at Waterloo in […]