In November 2004 Blog Seven was a blog about the dead[…]

The Long Game
Repentance – of the non-trivial – strikes me as a human rarity. Read a piece in the Guardian about Josef Mengele the other day, living out his days eating with a dwindling band of ex-pat sympathisers, grousing about the poor[…]

History Today
Wanting to ‘take the temperature’ of the discipline I picked up the latest issue of this worthy magazine. Wasn’t very impressed. Very dry, very British, rather too military. The best article by far was on conscientious[…]

The Romans
The Romans is another Dr. Who historical story, as clownish and clumsy as The Aztecs is weighty and intelligent. The show is a wretched mix of leaden drama (the most unconvincing gladiator fighting you’ll ever see) and feeble slapst[…]

Ukraine
The Ukrainian election coverage by the BBC surprised me. Lead item for the last two nights and highly detailed in terms of context.
Why is this? Other elections in former Soviet Republics this year received far less BBC coverage. Georgia (whe[…]

POST INTRO 1: I just saw a man as I got off the bus with a tiny little moustache shading the philtrum twixt nose and lip but no wider than his actual nose. I do not believe I have ever seen a moustache like this on a live human being.
POST INTRO 2: I[…]

END-TIMES WATCH #3:
back in the 19th-century anthropologists and other colonial social scientists made studies of the various native societies and cultures that imperialism was smashing: religions which revolved round animism and the fetish object a[…]

Modern Archaeology may seem a contradiction in terms, but its a big thing in acadaemia at the moment. Maybe its because students like rummaging through landfills. Fact of the mattr is with the disposable aspect of everyday culture there are aspects o[…]

RIP VHS: Marky Mark Lawson on the downfall of VHS. I can’t comment on the ‘common culture’ stuff as I was just a kid back then, but his evocations of overwritten and thick-piled videotape labels obscure one key aspect of the video: […]

END-TIMES WATCH #2:
“[Ewing] insisted he and his team had nothing but respect for Kennedy and for history”[…]