Category Archives: History

A Storm of Arrows From the English Longbow

At the beginning of Andrew Davidson’s book, The Gargoyle, the main character is driving along a mountain road, high on cocaine and bourbon. He has a distinct feeling that he is about to be ambushed, for some reason, and, sure enough, he sees “a volley of flaming arrows swarming out of the woods, directly at

Food in the Middle Ages: Eight Things You Probably Didn’t Know

Food is one of my favourite topics, and if I weren’t obsessing here about the Middle Ages, I’d probably be blogging about my food obsessions. Food is not really a concern in my novel (at least not at the moment), but I’ve done a little bit of reading on the topic as research. Not a

Inspiring Places: Historyfish.net

“Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.” Or so said D.H. Lawrence. Which gives me some comfort, because I seem to be doing all I can to avoid my writing, this morning. I’ve spent the last couple of hours brewing a Shitake Beef Stew that will be consumed tonight. I’ve

Inspiring Churches in Out-of-the-Way Places

I’m not religious in the traditional sense, but I find endless inspiration in churches. If not for the glory of God, they are, at least, remarkable monuments to the human imagination — the human striving for artistic and architectural perfection, the capture of enormous space, the making of humankind in the image of a universal

An Anachronism in the Age of Twitter

Everyone has a blog … everyone’s on Twitter … everyone’s feverishly tapping out 140-character wisdoms on their cell phone keypads. The paradigm is shifting towards instantaneous communication: short, sharp one-liners, or one screen at a time. And then there are people like Randy — a no-holds barred, out and out anachronism in this day and

More Utopia?

When I was in my mid-teens, I had a very good friend who was a bit of an intellectual. He was shy, quiet and somewhat of an outcast, like me. We were bookworms, and in our reading and discussions, we moved through a fairly impressive range of topics. Spirituality, the occult, politics, literature, advertising and feminism were