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England’s First Double Agents?
By Fred Smith | @Fred_E_Smith The disturbing events which have recently unfolded in the small English town of Salisbury appear to belong more to the set of a Hollywood spy thriller or the pages of an Ian Fleming novel than to reality. From a historical perspective, the role of spies and informants on all sides during both the…
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Moving Statues and Moving Away from the Catholic Church in Ireland
By Aoife O’Leary McNeice (@aolmcn) In May 2018, the Republic of Ireland voted by a landslide to remove the 8th Amendment from its constitution.[1] The Amendment stated that the right to life of the unborn child was equal to that of the mother, which essentially made abortion illegal unless the mother’s life was at risk.[2] The referendum…
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16. Le Cochon Noir (‘The Black Pig’) Songbook
By Sam Young (@samyoung102) Le Cochon Noir is a booklet of anticlerical songs produced in Marseilles in 1902 by the songwriter Eugène Besson. [i] Though humorous in tone, Besson’s songs are sharp in their condemnation of the Catholic clergy. Priests are ridiculed throughout as gluttons (the title song refers to a cleric’s black robes), liars…
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12. A Monument to the Great Fire of London
By Zoë Jackson (@ZoeMJackson1) If you have ever disembarked off the London Tube at Monument, you have probably walked past the memorial from which the station gets its name. This 202-foot (61 metres) high column was built to memorialise the 1666 Great Fire of London, which destroyed thousands of houses and numerous churches in central…
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24. Birthday Candles for Good Luck – A Look at Georges de la Tour’s Chiaroscuro
by Tiffany Laloy At the height of Counter-Reformation France in the XVIIth century, Baroque art was in part used as a tool to promote the Catholic faith and to inspire and impress the masses.[1] And whilst the extravagance and opulence of some of these religious paintings did indeed arouse emotion and religious fervor, Georges de…
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