The likes of the British Museum, Louvre and Metropolitan may get the lion’s share of publicity, artefacts and controversy, but small museums are the staple of any dedicated culture lover. And while meandering through the interweb I came across Brooklyn’s Living Torah Museum, one of New York’s quaintest collections. While its illustrious downtown neighbours are afforded giant beaux arts buildings, the Living Torah Museum is in a private home in Borough Park, 1601 41st Street. Its surroundings may not be as epic as most museums, but its collection is not to be sniffed at: since its inception curator Rabbi Shimon…
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According to Thesaurus.com, ‘moo-juice’ is a valid synonym for milk, a term soon to enter my local pub’s lexicon. I was trying to find something snappy for the title of this blog, on one of the best ancient myths I’ve ever heard. ‘Mad’ will do. Our next Ancient World in London video homes in on ancient astronomy, featuring famed astronomer Paul Murdin. Paul gave a special HKlecture on his book Secrets of the Universe last month, catching up with me afterwards for a chat on camera. And while the 25,000-year-old Ishango Bone might just be my favourite-ever ancient artefact, a…
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While creating the next instalment of our Ancient World in London video series on ancient astronomy, we came across an odd little artefact called the Ishango Bone. Exotic-sounding, it’s little more than a knobbled baboon’s fibula, but the 25,000-year-old notches along its length are much more than a caveman’s conquests. Discovered in the then-Belgian Congo by Jean Heinzelin de Braucourt in 1960, the bone was first thought to be around 10,000 years old. Yet later tests pushed its date back another 15,000 years, around 20 millennia before the first-ever civilizations sprang from the Middle East. Today it remains on display…
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London is under attack! But don’t be alarmed, this is no April Fool: London’s always been under attack. For over two thousand years the city has been invaded, burnt, bridged and bombed. But while Boudicca, Caesar, Cnut and Hitler have been some of the city’s biggest enemies, today it’s the turn of climate change to have London scrambling her defences with the impressive Thames Barrier. Today the barrier’s iconic row of ‘sandals’ protect over a million Londoners from the perils of El Nio. But it’s just one of the places we visited as part of our defences tour down the…
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Each year up to 40,000 pour into Stonehenge for the Summer Solstice, banging drums, singing songs and generally having a wild time (here’s a guide on taking photographs at Stonehenge). But it’s just one of four times each year that the stone circle is open to the public, the other three being Winter Solstice and the Spring and Autumn Equinoxes. While some see it as a chance to get up close and personal to one of the world’s best-known landmarks, or just to have a party, to others Stonehenge is a spiritual centre, an ethereal round table from which to…
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When I’m strolling through the British Museum’s Egyptian Sculpture Gallery taking in its ancient statues, stelae and scriptures, it’s hard not to think something’s missing. For among its rows of exotic artefacts, nothing on display relates to Egypt’s most famous king in modern times, Tutankhamun. And I think Britain deserves to have kept hold of at least some of the ancient world’s greatest pieces. Firstly I think I need to set the record straight: I’m not some postmodern British colonialist, sipping on Pimm’s while the servants polish my Blunderbus. Tutankhamun’s discovery was made by an Englishman, funded by an Englishman…
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“What’s in a name?” opined a portly Englishman recently, whose entire family had been handed ASBOs for verbally abusing their neighbours. This sort of stoic ignorance blights the English, much like bad hair or David Cameron, and it’s been going on for centuries. Boudicca was a Celtic warrior queen, a bloodthirsty battle-axe who massacred her way through Colchester, London and St Albans in 60AD (see a video on Roman Colchester here). By the time she’d been defeated at the mysterious Battle of Watling Street a year later, all three cities lay in tatters, and 80,000 were dead. Not a forgettable…
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Some of you, like us, may be visiting Stonehenge for this Saturday’s Spring Equinox celebrations (see event listing here). Yet I suspect a fair few more of you will be sinking pints of Guinness in homage to Saint Patrick tonight, staggering home wearing a green top hat which looked oh-so-cool a few hours ago. But if you’re going to be on the Emerald Isle this weekend, why not combine the two, by visiting Loughcrew, Ireland’s best-known megalithic cairn. At the Spring and Autumn equinoxes, Loughcrew’s cairn T is bathed in light, and the sun symbols on its back chamber can…
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What’s 84 miles long, 1,888 years old and marked the edge of Roman rule in Britain? Hadrian’s Wall of course – and the landmark got a spectacular makeover this weekend with a line of beacons stretching its entirety. The event, named ‘Illuminating Hadrian’s Wall’, marked the 1,600th anniversary of the end of the Roman occupation in Britain, and needed no fewer than 1,100 hardy volunteers to brave the harsh winds of northern England to make it happen. We know it’s a far cry from London – about 300 miles, in fact – but it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance (make that once-in-about-250-lifetimes)…
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The BNP hit national headlines again last weekend, as Britain limps towards this year’s general election. After having voted to scrap their ‘whites-only’ membership policy, the far-right group introduced a measure whereby prospective members are vetted for up to two hours on whether they support the ‘integrity of the indigenous British’. We, the native British people, the party’s website valiantly claims, will be an ethnic minority in our own country within sixty years. Thankfully Central London County Court ruled the membership move discriminatory, so Nick Griffin and his cronies will have to go back to the drawing board for another…