28th June 2014 was the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarajevo, by a 19 year old Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip. Gavrilo was born in a remote hamlet in northern Bosnia into a peasant family who were ruthlessly exploited by their […]

Flora Sands was the only British woman to fight as an active combatant in the First World War. She was born in Yorkshire on January 22nd, 1876. Her early childhood was spent in County Cork, where her father was a minister of the church. When she was nine, the family moved to Marksford, Suffolk and […]

The Hollywood of the late 1920’s and early 30’2 reflects the widespread pessimism and loss of confidence that was the initial reaction of the American people to the Wall Street Crash, the worst financial crisis of modern times. As with the rest of American industry, Hollywood was forced to adapt to economic recession: to cut […]

Some of you may have seen the three part series, “Our Mothers, our Fathers”, screened on Saturday evenings on BBC2 recently. The three short films give a brutally honest and moving account of the moral dilemmas faced by ordinary young Germans during the Nazi regime. Each episode charts the brutalisation of German youth and the […]

This week, a report from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) stated that the number of students undertaking a language degree is at its lowest level in a decade. In fact, between the 2010-11 and 2012-13 academic years, the number of acceptances onto Modern Foreign Language (MFL) courses fell by 22 per cent. […]

Traditionally, it is apparent that children and young people are overwhelmed with educational opportunities and learning development, being given a mass of information on a daily basis on a wide variety of subjects and levels of ability. It has become the norm in Western society that children should develop academically; it may be argued that […]

When working full time, it can be difficult to achieve the desired work-life balance which motivates an employee to want to work, instead of feeling as though they have to work. Many employees who also double as a parent or carer can feel as though they are surviving under a cloud of guilt, being pulled […]

The UK exam system is set to change quite a bit over the next three or four years. Both the A-level and GCSE systems are going through significant changes, starting with A-levels. What does this mean for current and prospective students? As long as you take all your examinations by June 2016, you are unlikely […]

British and German historians agree on the Kaiser’s unfortunate personality traits and their impacts on the events leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. His private letters, diaries and public correspondence show him as a bombastic bully, indecisive, untrustworthy, often frightened of his actions, a racist and an anti-Semite. His racial prejudices […]

In 1914 there were no mobile telephones, televisions or ipods. There were no computers and so no twitter or You Tube. Cinema and radio were still a novelty. People received their news via the tabloid papers, telegrams or witten letters. And none of these methods was entirely reliable. Communications between individuals and governments tended to […]