The Blog

Introduction — The tale of St Dmitri of the Don is a tale of the quest to free a people from foreign domination, of hard-fought victory and of wholly avoidable defeat. In 1380, Grand Duke Dmitri I of Moscow, aged just twenty-nine, freed the city from generations of vassalage to the Tartar Golden Horde, only for treachery to bring all that he had achieved to nothing in the very hour of triumph.

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Introduction — When the Roman Emperor Constantine ended decades of persecution for Christians in February 313, those in Britain returned to their churches with simple joy. Yet missionaries to Anglo-Saxon Britain in 597 found a church scattered and plagued by alien beliefs. St Bede blamed a priest from Egypt, Arius, for the startling change.

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Introduction — Wilfrid Israel (1899-1943) was a wealthy German retailer, who used his business as a cover to bring thousands of Jewish children to Britain in the run-up to the Second World War, saving them from ‘deportation, extermination and annihilation’ - words thought too melodramatic at the time, but only too accurate.

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Introduction — As soon as power had been secured after the Revolution of 1789, France’s new government began invading neighbouring countries in Europe, and seeking to evangelize the world with revolutionary fervour. Happily, the seed of republicanism fell on very stony ground on this side of the Channel.

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Introduction — On Saturday afternoon, May 31st, 1533, Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, was taken from the Tower of London to Westminster Hall, to be crowned in the Abbey next morning. The wider public was disgusted by the way Henry had jilted Catherine, by a two-year affair, a secret marriage, and a controversial divorce (in that order); yet crowded streets were hung with bunting, and the cavalcade was magnificent.

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