John Wilmot (b. April 1, 1647, d. July 26, 1680), the 2nd Earl of Rochester (Baron of Adderbury in England, Viscount Athlone in Ireland), was one of the most fascinating and entertaining figures in Restoration Period England. Known as a drunk, a rake, an intellectual, and good fun to have around at parties, he died young at the age of 33 from the collective effects of several venereal diseases along with nephritis. His lasting legacy besides his being a complete libertine was as a great poet of his time whose works were once censored during the Victorian Era for having been far too risqué.
With such great raw material to work from, you’d think it’d be easy to make a great series from it. Apparently it wasn’t. The BBC1 series Rogue Heroes based on the Robert MacIntyre book of the same name is an altogether silly comic-book effort to tell the incredible story of the formation of the elite British Special Air Service during…read more
Just shy of 6 months after he became the second person in the UK to receive a Covid-19 vaccine (he got the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine), William “Bill” Shakespeare passed away on May 26, 2021. Shakespeare became famous on December 8, 2020 when he received his first Covid vaccine jab. It was a momentous occasion for him, as well as everyone…read more
The United Kingdom on December 8, 2020 became the first nation to begin widespread distribution of a working Covid-19 vaccine. At the University Hospital in Coventry, in what hopes to be the beginning of the end for the pandemic that effectively shut down the world for most of 2020, 90-year-old Margaret Keenan became the first person in the world outside…read more
It didn’t have as compelling a birth as the first Special Air Service regiment. It didn’t have its great founder driving point in a souped-up jeep during attacks on German air bases. It didn’t have the romance of the desert as its initial stomping grounds. About the only thing it seemed to have going for it was the reputation of…read more
When it comes to polar exploration, history is the mother of all excursion. To close out 2018, Louis Rudd became the second person to complete a solo crossing of the continent of Antarctica. In what seems a repeat of the Shackleton/Amundsen race to the pole (that was a race to the pole and not a traversal of the continent), the…read more