Farewell the trumpets

Farewell the Trumpets is the title of the final volume of the Pax Britannica trilogy on the rise and fall of the British Empire, written by the late Jan Morris. As the three books mostly cover the Victorian era, with the third opening with Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, it feels like a goodRead More

News past

I have this vague plan to bring all of my blog posts under the one site. I have too many websites, either active or passive (but still kept live), and it is increasingly difficult (and costly) to keep on top of them all. Whether having all posts from different sites will work, I don’t know,Read More

Namesakes

For many years my name was unusual; I thought, perhaps, unique. There were few people called Luke when I was growing up (things started to change following the release of Star Wars in 1977). The surname McKernan was a rarity outside of parts of Northern Ireland. The combination of Luke McKernan, the bringing together ofRead More

Rebuilding

A novel was published recently, Heinrich Gerlach’s Breakout at Stalingrad, which has an extraordinary history behind it. Its author fought on the German side at the Battle of Stalingrad. He was captured by the Soviets, and while imprisoned he wrote a novel about the war, the manuscript of which was confiscated. But upon his releaseRead More

Endnotes

I have been reading Magic Moments by the literary critic John Sutherland. It is a memoir constructed around the books (and some films) that he experienced when young, viewed again from the perspective of its subject six decades later. It’s an ingenious way of constructing a biography, with each chapter devoted to the stories heRead More