Monthly Archives: May 2017

Shakespeare and I have never really got on. Sure I’ve seen productions of his plays that were fantastic, and some that were quite frankly terrible, and the odd experimental version that was, well, odd. And the reason why I went … Continue reading →

A couple of Saturdays ago we treated ourselves to a day out and drove, with no clear plan, to Echuca, a town on the Murray about 200km to the west of us. In the nineteenth century Echuca was a major … Continue reading →

As a final bit of investigation around the Madeleine Smith case I thought I’d have a look at how widely it was reported in Australia and New Zealand. First of all I went to QueryPic to see if the case … Continue reading →

Continuing on the theme of what we can learn about life in 1850’s Scotland from the trial of Madeleine Smith, one interesting detail is that she exchanged ambrotypes (an early type of glass plate photography) with her lover, at around … Continue reading →

I’ve recently been reading an account of the trial of Madeleine Smith, which took place in Glasgow in 1857 – in essence Madeleine Smith was accused of poisoning her lower class lover because of her upcoming more respectable marriage to … Continue reading →

Last night I was idly watching Michael Portillo’s Great British Railway journeys (SBS has bought a load of these years old and shows them after the news as an antidote to the lunacy of the world), and in the episode … Continue reading →