by David West | Feb 13, 2026 | News
On the 13th of February, 1692, the MacDonald Clan were massacred in Glen Coe. Glen Coe is one of Scotland’s most dramatic and evocative landscapes, a place where raw natural beauty and dark human history are inseparably intertwined. Situated in the western Highlands,...
by David West | Feb 12, 2026 | News
On the 12th of February, 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was exiled from the Soviet Union. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was one of the most formidable moral and literary voices of the twentieth century. A...
by David West | Feb 11, 2026 | News
On the 11th of February, 1144, Robert of Chester completed the translation from Arabic into Latin of Testamenti Morieni, a textbook on alchemy. Alchemy in medieval Europe was not merely a proto-chemistry obsessed with gold-making, but a rich intellectual tradition...
by David West | Feb 10, 2026 | News
The feast day of Saint Scholastica is the 10th of February. In Fire and Earth, the second book in the Sir Anthony Standen Adventures, Anthony has to solve a series of murders occurring on Saints’ feast days. I don’t think I used Saint Scholastica, but it would have...
by David West | Feb 9, 2026 | News
On the 9th of February, 1555, John Hooper the Bishop of Gloucester was burnt at the stake. John Hooper (c.1495–1555), Bishop of Gloucester and later Worcester, was among the most resolute and uncompromising figures of the English Reformation. A theologian shaped by...
by David West | Feb 8, 2026 | News
On the 8th of February, 1950, the secret police of East Germany were established. They were called the Stasi. Having recently read the George Smiley series by John Le Carré, I feel I know a fair amount about the Stasi, but I’m sure there must be more to learn. The...
