Inspiring Excitement and Passion about History and the Humanities
It’s not much of a secret that Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley had a Sort Of Thing going on in her court. The famously-Virgin Queen had one possible True Love – Robert Dudley, the 1st Earl of Leicester. In 1575 Elizabeth was on one of her summer progresses through the midlands, and she visited Dudley…
Fair warning – I am sitting in an airport in Berlin as I write this. It’s 9am local time and I’ve been here for almost two hours on a layover waiting to go back to Spain after an overnight flight during which time I didn’t sleep, but I did watch Tammy with Melissa McCarthy, which…
About a month ago I was in the UK for a girls’ weekend (by myself), and as I’ve been trying to do more with my Renaissance English History Podcast lately (like my Tudor Minutes on youtube), I decided to find an interesting person to interview for the show. At the top of my wish list…
I’ve started doing something fun on youtube this week. I run the Renaissance English History Podcast, which currently gets about 120k listeners each month, and I’ve been trying to figure out ways that I can make more of a community out of it. Do more episodes, lead tours of England, write books; ways to get…
Recently on a train trip from Gatwick to Cirencester, I passed through Swindon. Swindon, in general, isn’t a huge tourist attraction. In fact, Jasper Fford seems to have built a website dedicated to taking the piss out of Swindon as a tourist attraction (pointing out the double helix carpark as a major sight). One thing Swindon does…
I keep hearing the name Inigo Jones in various books I’m reading, and it always makes me kind of want to giggle because it reminds me of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride. It’s kind of hard to take seriously someone who makes you think that they’re about to jump out at you and accuse…
“As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle” 19th century philosopher Balzac Before I had a kid I was never a big coffee drinker. Oh, I knew coffee – when…
I’ve had a project going on over the past few years that I call my Shameful Shakespeare Catch-up (shameful because it’s shameful that so much of my life has gone by without me reading any Shakespeare at all – it’s been since college, which, sadly, was fifteen years ago) and today I read Richard III. I’ve…
“music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it even if we so desired” Boethius: De institutione musica Most serious musicians understand that music and math are inextricably linked. The early mathematician Pythagoras discovered many different ratios within musical harmonies (a perfect fifth, for example) by playing around with glasses of…