history

DESPITE having loved classical music since boyhood, I have never been much drawn to the music of the late Sir Michael Tippett. I suspect the fault lies in me, not in the composer the BBC Music Magazine ranked at number seven in a list of the 25 greatest British composers of all time, ahead of Gustav Holst and Thomas Tallis and even the German-born but anglicised Handel. I much prefer the music of his contemporaries William Walton and Benjamin Britten, not to mention the prolific and accessible Malcolm Arnold and the incomparable Ralph Vaughan Williams, with Britten being, in my opinion, the greatest musical genius to emerge from the British Isles.

Until recently, I knew very little about Tippett, except that, like Britten, he was an avowed pacifist who served time in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector during World War II; and, also like Britten, was a homosexual, but much more openly so, unashamedly presenting as camp in later life, unlike the reticent and almost puritanical Britten.

At the height of the Battle of Britain, when the UK government needed a secret location to store 186,332 gold bars, it turned to Canada.

Shipped across the Atlantic and stored beneath a hastily constructed vault in Montreal, Operation Fish became known both for the vast amounts of gold involved – and the immense secrecy that followed.

The lesson: Canada and its banks can keep secrets.

A teenager’s account of the difficulties of post-war life has been found hidden in a door panel that was saved from the tip.

The handwritten note tells of the daily six-hour power cuts, no coal “in any quantity” and short supply of food.

Tom Yuen, 31, from Cardiff, was searching for second hand door panels when he found the note, from 1947, which he says felt like a “handshake through time”.

Rationing lasted until 1954.

With a rumble and colorful flashes, the last true mob-era casino in Las Vegas, the Tropicana, a landmark hotel and gambling parlor, was reduced to rubble on Wednesday.

The Tropicana, 1957 – 2024. pic.twitter.com/04akctLVgK

— Las Vegas Issues (@VegasIssues) October 9, 2024

Kath and I strolled through the Tropicana, it was falling to seed even then but still retained that Vegas aura.

Vietnam Veterans’ Day is annually observed on March 29. It commemorates the hardships suffered and sacrifices made by nine million Americans during the Vietnam War, and their families who supported them before, during, and after.

Through the years I’ve done a great deal of research and introspection about the war, to understand the war’s pathology from beginning to end. I’ve returned to Vietnam twice for visits and research, and Vietnamese and American friends and veterans have provided their perspectives. The net result of these efforts yielded an unequivocal verdict: the war was a grave self-inflicted injury on our nation on many levels, a “Greek tragedy” writ large, that changed our country forever and whose negative impact still haunts us.

As the Abdication crisis reached boiling-point in the dying days of 1936, was Wallis Simpson ready and willing to be bought out of her forthcoming marriage to King Edward VIII?

Newly viewed Cabinet documents indicate that, at the height of the crisis, the question of a cash settlement to get rid of the twice-divorced American was actually proposed by her lawyer.

Had the deal been struck it could have had far-reaching consequences lasting down to the present day, 88 years later, resulting in a different monarch occupying the throne – not King Charles.

For decades, the Long Island Hitlers have been living quietly in the New York suburbs. Alexander (whose middle name is Adolf), Louis, and Brian Stuart-Houston—the family name was changed after the war first to Hiller and then to Stuart-Houston—are three of Adolf Hitler’s last surviving relatives, the grandsons of the Nazi dictator’s half-brother Alois Hitler Jr. Their father, William “Willy” Patrick Hitler, was born in Liverpool in 1911 and served in the U.S. Navy against Germany during the Second World War. Willy’s half-brother Heinz, who Alois had sired with his second wife, served in the Wehrmacht and purportedly died while a prisoner of the Soviets in 1942. Until recently, the Führer’s great-nephews have understandably declined to talk to the press.

Since the Colombian navy discovered the final resting place of the Spanish galleon San José in 2015, its location has remained a state secret, the wreck – and its precious cargo – left deep under the waters of the Caribbean.

Efforts to conserve the ship and recover its precious cargo have been caught up in a complicated string of international legal disputes, with Colombia, Spain, Bolivian indigenous groups and a US salvage company laying claim to the wreck, and the gold, silver and emeralds onboard thought to be worth as much as $17bn.

When Colombia tried to auction off part of the bounty to fund the colossal costs of recovering the ship, Unesco and the country’s high courts intervened.

New technology permits the deciphering of ancient scrolls without opening them—and the rush is on to expand our knowledge of these materials while we still can.

A computer scientist has labored for 21 years to read carbonized ancient scrolls that are too brittle to open. His efforts stand at last on the brink of unlocking a vast new vista into the world of ancient Greece and Rome.

Brent Seales, of the University of Kentucky, has developed methods for scanning scrolls with computer tomography, unwrapping them virtually with computer software, and visualizing the ink with artificial intelligence. Building on his methods, contestants recently vied for a $700,000 prize to generate readable sections of a scroll from Herculaneum, the Roman town buried in hot volcanic mud from the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

When Clement Boland, a former private with 2nd Battalion, The Mercian Regiment, saw a 50-metre wide depression in the ground where the first shots of the Battle of Waterloo were fired, the first thing he felt was “sadness”.

There, beneath layers of soil, in a quarry that archaeologists believe may be the first evidence of a mass grave from that notoriously bloody fight over two centuries ago, was a piece of French musket flint. The poor state of the flint, dated 1812, indicates that the weapon was jamming as it was being fired.