Sublime

I remember an English lad who was always the life of the crew, but whom we afterwards lost overboard, standing for nearly ten minutes at the galley, with this pot of tea in his hand, waiting for a chance to get down into the forecastle; and seeing what he thought was a "smooth spell," started to go forward. He had just got to the end of t

sabotage and destruction in Gibraltar, and return undetected. In chapter 13 of Ian Fleming’s novel Thunderball, James Bond tells Felix Leiter of the CIA that the failure to spot what was going on in the Olterra was ‘[o]ne of the blackest marks against Intelligence during the whole war’. The Italian ‘gentleman crook’ in the novel, Emilio Largo, has

Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, was stranded from September 1704 to 2 February 1709 on one of the Juan Fernández islands off the coast of Chile.

All this had been discussed and discussed again. And though the Caird’s chances of actually reaching South Georgia were remote, a great many men genuinely wanted to be taken along. The prospect of staying behind, of waiting and not knowing, of possibly wintering on this hateful island was far from attractive. Shackleton had already made up his mind

After being briefed by Stirling on an impending attack on Benghazi, and the way that the SAS represented ‘a new form of warfare’ which had ‘awesome potential’, Churchill quoted to Smuts the lines from Byron’s Don Juan: ‘He was the mildest-mannered man / That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat.’ The next day, he summoned Stirling to the Embassy to d

This is preserved in a remarkable English document that records the conversations between Alfred, the king of Wessex, and a visitor to his court in the 880s, as mentioned above in the prologue. Named there as ‘Ohthere’, he was almost certainly called Óttarr in his own language and seems to have come from the region around the Lofoten islands in Arc

After ‘a few years’ Patrick was able to return to his family. This is remarkable: how on Earth was a young man, stolen from his home at sixteen, able to navigate his way back in a country with no maps or road signs and not much more than local knowledge of place names?

News of the invasion reached Whitehall within hours, causing outright panic. Clement Attlee, Leader of the Opposition, immediately called up the War Office file on Norway, only to find that it was completely empty. On the cover were the cryptic letters SFA. ‘I suppose it means Sweet Fanny Adams,’ he said to Winston Churchill when the two of them me