I know nothing about football, I mean really, not even background knowledge. I grew up in a motor racing household,…
What happened when we all moved in together?
In 10,000BCE there were 4 million people in the world. The WORLD. You can do your own modern comparison, according…
Medieval freedom of information
“Freedom of information” and “open data” as concepts of governance have modern associations, partly because a steady progress is widely presumed from “closed”…
Voter ID – a list, with snarky commentary
I didn’t know, until I had the misfortune to be watching BBC Parliament today (I hate how that happens) that…
A History of the World in Admin
(Mortimer, A. E., Press tbc, forthcoming). It is pretty clear that one of the biggest divisions in the Brexit debate…
Wine-dark sea and violet sheep: what difference could climate make to colour perception?
It seemed the Greeks lived in murky and muddy world, devoid of colour, mostly black and white and metallic, with…
The secret is that there is no secret: Farage, Trump, Assange, Putin and the fabric of reality
There’s a great moment in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum when the protagonist’s girlfriend, following on chapters and chapters of the…
The Second Referendum, or, Obliquity
The following has occurred: The election result has opened up a window of opportunity for rethinking Brexit. Certainly that’s what…
A walk through Montpelier, Bristol
Above, Lower Cheltenham Place, Montpelier, Bristol, with those flat-fronted houses that could be any age from 1810s to 1850s.…
Who dug the New Cut?
This is a story about oral history and how oral history can conflict with official history. It is not yet, unfortunately,…
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