949
A mother is determined to see that her disabled daughter gets the help she needs.
Fr George Skaramangás (1867-1944) was an energetic and popular figure on the Greek island of Paros, both as priest at the Ekatontapyliani (Church of the Hundred Doors) and as founder of the island’s Byzantine Museum. His adopted daughter married Spiros Mavris, a local hero of the Resistance. The following events took place in his time.
Posted February 20 2018
950
An English sailor became the target of the first worldwide manhunt following an audacious act of piracy.
From 1688 to 1697, William III’s England and Louis XIV’s France were locked in the Nine Years’ War. Louis took the dispute to England’s colonies in North America, the Caribbean, and even India, but the French fleet was not the only peril upon the high seas.
Posted February 19 2018
951
Ethel Smyth puts on a show for a self-declared music enthusiast.
Ethel Smyth (to rhyme with ‘blithe’) came home to England in 1880 after winning many friends among the musical celebrities of Leipzig, and found that she had become something of a celebrity herself. It took a visit from a neighbour to remind her that whether you are a Smyth or a Schubert, ‘celebrity’ is a relative term.
Posted February 18 2018
952
Wilkins Micawber had little to give David Copperfield at their parting, save two words of advice.
Wilkins Micawber has just been released from a spell in prison for debt, and has resolved to take his wife away from London to Plymouth, leaving David Copperfield to find new lodgings. There is little that Mr Micawber can give David in leave-taking, except two words of heartfelt advice.
Posted February 16 2018
953
George Stephenson was only too pleased to save the Government from its scientific advisers.
When a line from London to Newcastle was first planned in the 1840s, Brunel recommended an atmospheric railway, which pulls carriages along with vacuum tubes laid between the rails instead of locomotives. The decision lay with the Government’s chief engineer, Robert Stephenson, but his father George made sure the idea got no further than Robert’s outer office.
Posted February 15 2018
954
Fursey was a 7th-century Irish monk whose visions of the afterlife made a great impression on St Bede.
Shortly before Lent each year, the Church dedicates one Sunday to reflection on the Last Judgment. For the seventh-century monk Bede, the go-to authority on the matter was Fursey (?597-650), an Irish missionary to the Kingdom of the East Angles just a generation earlier, who had received several visions of the soul’s journey to heaven.
Posted February 13 2018