Back in 2021 I wondered whether the year could be worse than 2020. It was. And this year, 2022, has been worse still: for New Zealand, certainly, it’s featured a month-long occupation of Parliament grounds that ended with a street battle such as New Zealand has not seen since 1913. We have rampant inflation created … More Have a happy festive season!
There is something about certain historical figures that draws writers. Many years ago I did an undergrad course on the intersection between history and biography where my specialist focus was Admiral Sir John Fisher, the volcanic, combatative and controversial head of the Royal Navy during the ‘naval race’ that led up to the First World … More OMG! – the story of Admiral Fisher and his biographers
New Zealand has been at war with rather a lot of nations over the years. Most of them declared war on us, not the other way around (we’re the good guys). But there are a few that New Zealand took on. Including – wait for it – wait for it. Finland. Yup. Finland. It was … More Countries on which New Zealand has declared war
It is 83 years this weekend since Europe crashed into war, beginning a global struggle that did not end until 1945 and which resulted in estimated deaths topping 75 million, many of them civilians. The Second World War was the largest conflict yet seen in the history of humanity, the most lethal, and the most … More The world at war – again
This coming week marks the 108th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, a war that was meant to be over in just a few months but where the fighting did not end until November 1918. The death toll was apocalyptic, particularly on the Western Front that ran from the Channel coast to … More The war to end all wars, apparently
Of late there has been a huge upswing in the trend towards ‘colourising’ old monochrome photos. Adding colour to monochrome isn’t new, of course – there was a whole industry devoted to ‘hand tinting’ back in the day. It was done to give people the feel of being there. Special oil paints were manufactured for … More The art of colourising old photographs
Between about 1250 and 1150 BCE an essentially ‘globalised’ and multi-national civilisation based around the eastern Mediterranean collapsed into ruin. The collapse was violent, relatively swift, and marked the effective end not just of the age in which bronze was the primary alloy, but of multiple nations including the Hittite Empire, Mycenaean Greece, Kassite-era Babylonia, … More The late Bronze Age collapse and our future
The Battle of Jutland was the largest naval battle of the First World War and produced casualties of similar scale to the disastrous ‘pushes’ on the Western Front. Over six thousand British sailors died and more than 2,550 German, all in a hectic afternoon and night. More than half of the British were lost in … More Remembering history – the battle of Jutland, 116 years on
Back when I was a kid I read an awful lot of science fiction – mostly Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein with a fair amount of Niven, Pournelle and others stirred into the mix. All of them portrayed futures in which the engineering problems that still confront us today had been largely solved. Space travel was … More We are living in Arthur C Clarke’s future
I recently read an opinion piece from a UK journalist suggesting that Ukraine’s biggest mistake in recent years was to get rid of its nuclear weapons. When the Soviet Union broke up, Ukraine ended up with a significant part of the former Soviet arsenal – 176 ICBM’s carrying 1900 independent warheads, coupled with around 2600 … More The moral bankruptcy of nuclear weapons
Matthew Wright 
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