Author Archives: dgm

So, Singapore. I’ve always had a soft spot for Singapore. Both my father and his brother lived there during colonial times, and even when he was too old to travel, my father always wanted to see our photos of Singapore … Continue reading →

For some reason our car’s GPS decided to ignore tollways and took us an interesting way to Evora through wooded countryside and then on to the old main road north before branching west across wheat growing country that increasingly looked … Continue reading →

So there we were, heading down the tollway in our rental car. The tolls weren’t a problem, we’d filled in the paperwork for electronic tolling and agreed to settle the bill with the rental company when we brought the car … Continue reading →

So, on to Porto. We skipped breakfast, checked out and caught the Gatwick Express, as irritatingly that’s where TAP flights to Porto go from. Actually the whole business was pretty slick and seamless leaving us plenty of time for a … Continue reading →

This is a somewhat belated post, really to explain the lack of blogging over the last few weeks We spent the best part of six weeks in Europe, leaving in early September, so early that the day we left there … Continue reading →

Earlier this week I was on a plane, and given that flying is a fundamentally boring experience I whiled away the time watching a movie. The art house movie on offer was the wonderful, spare elegaic Lady Macbeth, beautifully photographed … Continue reading →

One of the aspects of the Madeleine Smith case that so titillated the mid Victorian audience was that not only did she have sex with her lover, but that she wrote gushingly about the experience. Probably neither the first, or … Continue reading →

A few days ago I read an article as to reasons why New Zealand really hadn’t produced any significant writers before the twentieth century. I was reading the article as I’ve taken to reading nineteenth century novels as part of … Continue reading →

Well, I though I would do the obvious and repeat my investigation of the distribution of the trial reports in New Zealand. Well that turned out not to be sensible – the non-Maori population in 1857 was only around 50,000, … Continue reading →

As part of my looking into how the news of the Madeleine Smith trial got to Australia I thought I’d break the reports of the trial down by date and place of publication. And it’s quite striking – the first … Continue reading →