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  God save our gracious King! Long live our noble King! God save the King! Send him victorious, Happy and glorious, Long to reign over us, God save the King.   Thy choicest gifts in store  On him be pleased to pour, Long may he reign.  May he defend our laws, And ever give us cause, To sing with heart and voice, God save the King. This is one of those ‘Well, I never knew that!’ posts.   St Peter’s Church, Budleigh Salterton Along with many Budleigh residents I attended the Special Commemoration Service for Her Majesty  Queen Elizabeth II in St Peter’s Church on Sunday 18 September. The service concluded with the singing of the two above verses of the traditional National Anthem, followed by this third verse which I did not recognise: Not in this land alone, But be God's mercies known From shore to shore: Lord make the nations see That men should brothers be, And form one family The wide world o'er. From the ever-helpful Wikipedia I lear...

Edward, Prince of Wales in around 1920, in a portrait by the British painter Reginald Grenville (1876-1941). Image credit: Wikipedia On 8 May 1939, Edward, Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, gave a radio broadcast which had been commissioned by the American National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC). That September would see the outbreak of the Second World War.     The broadcast was made during a visit to the First World War battlefields of Verdun, and it was the Duke’s first since abdicating in 1936.  In it he appealed for peace. These are his words: ‘I am deeply conscious of the presence of the great company of the dead, and I am convinced that could they make their voices heard they would be with me in what I am about to say. I speak simply as a soldier of the Last War whose most earnest prayer it is that such cruel and destructive madness shall never again overtake mankind. There is no land whose people want war.’ The broadcast was heard across the w...

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships. Image credit: Wikipedia Lemuel Gulliver, the fictional narrator of Jonathan Swift’s book, finds himself in Lilliput as the sole survivor of a shipwreck during his voyage from Bristol in 1699. He explains why the two island nations of Lilliput and its neighbour Blefuscu - ‘two great empires’ -have been engaged in ‘a most obstinate war for six-and-thirty moons past’.   ‘It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly ...

Commemorating an act of clemency: the monument honouring the Marquis de Bonchamp by David d'Angers in the abbey church of Saint-Florent-le-Vieil. Image credit: Wikipedia This marble figure by the French sculptor David d’Angers, with its gesture of protest against bloodshed, commemorates a rare act of humanity in October 1793 during the brutal civil war which followed the French Revolution.   Charles-Melchior Artus de Bonchamp, Marquis de Bonchamp, was a leader of the Royalist rebels nicknamed Les Chouans in the Vendée region of Western France who resisted Republican government forces after the execution of Louis XVI in Paris on 21 January 1793. A series of uprisings took place in the early 1790s, some of them inspired by loyalty to the Catholic Church in a region which was mainly rural. This was at a time when Paris revolutionaries aimed to sweep away religious traditions throughout France.    Bonchamp led the counter-revolutionaries to success in some engagements ...

Portrait of Erasmus by the German-Swiss painter Hans Holbein the Younger (c.1497-1543), in the collection of the National Gallery. Thanks to Erasmus’ recommendation, Holbein visited England where he was appointed King’s Painter under Henry VIII.   Image credit: Wikipedia Born in Rotterdam, Erasmus was a Dutch philosopher and Catholic theologian who is considered to be one of the greatest scholars of his time. He prepared important new Latin and Greek editions of the New Testament which influenced thinkers of the Protestant Reformation. By the time his Complaint of Peace was published, originally written in Latin, he had produced satirical works such as In Praise of Folly (1509). His Julius Excluded from Heaven (1514) was a satire of Pope Julius II whom Erasmus attacked for leading armies in full armour. The Querela Pacis , to give the work its Latin title, portrays, through the character of Peace, a world plagued not only by wars but by strife and dissension in all areas ...

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 1993 to Nelson R. Mandela and Frederik Willem de Klerk for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa. From their different points of departure, Mandela and de Klerk have reached agreement on the principles for a transition to a new political order based on the tenet of one man-one vote. By looking ahead to South African reconciliation instead of back at the deep wounds of the past, they have shown personal integrity and great political courage. Ethnic disparities cause the bitterest conflicts. South Africa has been the symbol of racially-conditioned suppression. Mandela’s and de Klerk’s constructive policy of peace and reconciliation also points the way to the peaceful resolution of similar deep-rooted conflicts elsewhere in the world. The previous Nobel Laureates Albert Lutuli and Desmond Tutu made important contribu...

The 1759 edition of Voltaire’s Candide From The New York Public Library    www.nypl.org ‘There was never anything so gallant, so spruce, so brilliant, and so well disposed as the two armies. Trumpets, fifes, hautboys, drums, and cannon made music such as Hell itself had never heard. The cannons first of all laid flat about six thousand men on each side; the muskets swept away from this best of worlds nine or ten thousand ruffians who infested its surface. The bayonet was also a sufficient reason for the death of several thousands. The whole might amount to thirty thousand souls. Candide, who trembled like a philosopher, hid himself as well as he could during this heroic butchery . At length, while the two kings were causing Te Deum to be sung each in his own camp, Candide resolved to go and reason elsewhere on effects and causes. He passed over heaps of dead and dying, and first reached a neighbouring village; it was in cinders, it was an Abare village which the Bulgarian...