This edited article about motor racing originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 627 published on 19 January 1974.

The discovery of Parry Thomas’s car Babs in the Pendine sands

The fine stretch of sand at Pendine in Carmarthenshire was hard and firm. J. G. Parry Thomas, a brilliant engineer and a highly successful racing driver, judged that the conditions were right for his attempt on the world land speed record.

The car in which he was hoping to secure this was called Babs. It was a huge track racing machine that he had bought for £125 and on which he had spent £700 making improvements. At its heart was a huge 12-cylinder engine that had powered an American “Liberty” bomber in the First World War.

If anything could shatter the achievements of Thomas’s rivals, it was surely this. Previously it had become the fastest machine on four wheels when Thomas had set up records of 169.24 mph and 171.09 mph in 1926. But, only nine months later, Malcolm Campbell of Britain had raised the record to 174.88 mph.

And now, another driver, Harry Segrave, was about to put the record out of Thomas’s reach by racing along a beach in Florida, U.S.A. with the thrust of two 400 hp aero engines.

But before this happened, Thomas wanted to have another crack at the record. This is why he was at Pendine on this day in March, 1927. Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Tolstoy originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 627 published on 19 January 1974.

Count Leo Tolstoy preparing to run away from home at the age of 82

It was still hours before dawn when the master of a large estate named Yasnaya Polyana let himself out of a side door and made his way to the stables, switching his torch on and off uncertainly as he went. Electrical gadgets were still new in 1910 and the torch was unfamiliar. Soon he had fallen in sudden darkness and lost his cap. Back through the biting cold of a Russian November night he went in to fetch another one, then back again to the stables to wake the startled coachman. In silence, the horses were harnessed, and after whispered instructions, luggage was hastily loaded on to the roof.

“Where to, Excellency?”

“The railway station! And quietly! We don’t want to wake your mistress!”

Gently the man coaxed his horses to a walk and the vehicle began to move. In minutes the bulk of the great house was swallowed in the darkness, while the coach’s occupant gave a sigh of satisfaction.

At the age of 82, Count Leo Tolstoy, Russia’s greatest man of letters, was running away from his wife and home. Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about sailing originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 627 published on 19 January 1974.

Alfred the Great’s ship design by Dan Escott

Upon the quaint charts of the Middle Ages, a giant stood in front of the Canary Islands, forbidding all further venture westward, by brandishing a club in the path of all vessels coming from the East. The horrors of the deep were also shown in the shape of sea monsters and water unicorns, which careered through space, ready to descend upon the navigator who had been unwise enough to sail too far away from home. Even in the time of Columbus, when the introduction of the compass into European ships should have diminished the imagined terrors of the sea, we find the Arabians, the best geographers of their time, showing on their maps the bony hand of Satan rising from the waves of the seas of darkness – as the Atlantic was then called – ready to seize the unwary mariner. The sailors of Columbus, on reaching the Sargasso Sea, thought they had reached the end of the world. Five years later, the crew of Da Gama, while rounding the Cape of Good Hope, imagined they saw in the threatening clouds gathered around the top of Table Rock, the form of a spectre waving off their vessel.

Today, most of the terrors of the sea have been banished; the only mysteries lie in the bottom of the ocean, and man is even now in the process of wresting these secrets from the depths. Instead of being man’s enemy, the sea has now become his potential saviour. In the future, it may well be his main source of food supply.

Between these two extremes, lies the whole history of the sea. Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Argentina originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 627 published on 19 January 1974.

The giant sculpted condor that faces the parliament building in Buenos Aires

The huge crowd gathered at Buenos Aires’ Ezeiza Airport to welcome home from exile the man who once ruled Argentina for nine years, who took power in the South American style by military coup, and who was overthrown in the same way. General Juan Domingo Peron, 78, the dictator who once lauded Hitler and Mussolini, was coming back.

But as his chartered airliner circled the city, shots suddenly scattered the waiting crowd. In a welter of shooting between political factions, more than a hundred people died and several hundred were wounded. High above the screams and gunfire, General Peron ordered his pilot to land at a nearby military airport rather than touch down in the middle of a massacre.

It was June 20, 1973, and another violent chapter in his turbulent life was over. The old dictator, was driven to his home in suburban Buenos Aires and did not appear for 23 days.

Serious doubts began to grow as to whether he would after all enter the presidential elections he had come home to contest in answer to pleas from his supporters. As the memories of the airport battle became just another memory in the bloody annals of Argentina’s history, General Peron agreed to run in the September 23 elections. His vice-presidential choice was his wife, Isabelita, a former cabaret dancer of 42. Their decision caused dissension among his followers who had revered his late second wife, Evita, the woman who hypnotised the masses with her compelling oratory and who became idolised in life and death. Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Ancient Rome originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 627 published on 19 January 1974.

Constantine’s vision before battle with Maxentius at the Gates of Rome, by Roger Payne

A single swift and irreversible decision changed completely the story of the Roman Empire and with it the story of the world. It was made by a man who was not even a Roman, a man who, in that pedigree-conscious empire, had origins which were veiled in obscurity.

The man was Diocletian, of Dalmatia, who was the new Emperor. His decision was that Rome should no longer be the empire’s capital.

The city would preserve all its 1,000 years of lustre, all its moral and spiritual traditions and all its grandeur. But as the geographical centre of a vast empire that had spread east and west to uncontrollable limits, it could not retain its capital status.

Only by de-centralising the government to places nearer the extremities could the Emperor create an administration to deal with the hordes of barbarians continually assaulting the outlying provinces of the empire.

Diocletian was the first good administrator the empire had had for years. At a stroke he severed the Roman world in two: henceforth there would be two empires with two capitals. They were the Western Empire, ruled from Milan, and the Eastern Empire, ruled from Nicomedia (now the town of Izmit in Turkey).

There would also be two emperors. Diocletian would rule the Eastern Empire and Maximian, his colleague, would rule the Western Empire. Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about English literature originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 626 published on 12 January 1974.

J R R Tolkien with characters from The Lord of the Rings

Professor Tolkien sighed, pushed back his chair from his desk, and reached for his pipe. At last the third and final volume of The Lord of the Rings was finished. Or at least as finished as Tolkien could ever feel it would be, for he hated this moment when his writing finally left his desk and went off to the publishers to be printed.

Usually he wrote and re-wrote his books many times, always feeling that there was something more he could do to improve them. But now his publishers, who had been demanding that he complete the book for weeks, had finally insisted that he send it to them.

It is hardly surprising that John Tolkien was such a perfectionist about his writing, however, for he was a very distinguished man. At the time when The Lord of the Rings was published he was Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University.

He was born in South Africa in 1892, and came to England with his mother four years later, when his father died. The family settled in Worcestershire in an area which is now a suburb of Birmingham but was then, in 1896, open country. Here John quickly developed a deep love of nature, while his imaginative mind devoured all the legends of King Arthur, and the fairy tales of George MacDonald, Andrew Lang, and many others.

As a small boy he did not go to school but was taught at home by his mother, and it was she who first stirred in him the interest in ancient languages which influenced the whole course of his life. She turned out to be a fine teacher, too, for in 1903, John won a scholarship to King Edward’s School in Birmingham. Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about the Vikings originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 626 published on 12 January 1974.

The ship in which Queen Asa was buried, along with many rich furnishings, was excavated in 1904

Every inch of the deck space was filled with giant-sized warriors, some wearing helmets. Shields were clasped to their breasts, and they carried an assortment of spears, swords, axes and arrows.

The enemy ships, long and slender with high bows and sterns, were lashed to each other, side by side.

King Hakon’s men lashed his ships to the enemy’s until there was a solid block of ships all fastened together. This was the way battles were fought in the days of the Norsemen, when every encounter was fought as if it were a land battle.

It was about 960 and the battle of Fitjar in western Norway was about to begin. The opposing forces were King Hakon’s men and an army assembled by the sons of Eric Bloodaxe.

Scornfully, King Hakon ripped off his armour and threw it to the deck of his ship. No other signal was needed to start the battle. With fearsome yells, the men threw their spears. Then, drawing their swords, they flung themselves into the affray.

The decks of the ships heaved and rolled as the armies gained or lost ground. Swords flashed. Axes crashed on to helmets. Arrows found their victims. Dead and wounded were flung derisively into the sea.

Hakon himself fought bravely, but an arrow pierced his arm and he died from the wound. Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Germany originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 626 published on 12 January 1974.

With the encouragement of his future prime minister, Otto von Bismark, the embattled Kaiser Wilhelm  tore up his letter of abdication, by John Keay

He was built like a giant and had a giant’s intellect. No one was surprised when doctors found after his death that his brain was the biggest they had ever seen. He claimed that no man should die until he had smoked 100,000 cigars and drunk 5,000 bottles of champagne, and when he himself died in 1898, aged 83, he had more than made good his claim.

There was not a statesman to equal him in his lifetime and everyone knew it, even his many enemies. Yet this extraordinary man, who looked as if nothing less than an earthquake could shake his composure, could lie awake at night hating his opponents, and could hurl an ink well across a room in an argument and harbour grudges for years. In fact, apart from his family and his dogs, he had hardly a friend in the world.

None of this mattered, for Otto von Bismarck had a simple aim in life. He was determined to make Prussia great at a time when she was merely one of a number of German states dominated by Austria. In succeeding, he achieved something even more remarkable.

He united Germany.

How then does this living Everest, born into a Prussian Junker family in 1815 (the Junkers were aristocratic landowners), come to be included in a series like this?

The answer is that he used might to achieve his ends. “Not by parliamentary majorities are the great questions of the day settled,” he once said, “but by iron and blood,” which soon got changed in the public mind to “blood and iron.” It was not that he liked war: he used it to gain his ends, fighting three in swift succession to make his king and country great. Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Ancient Rome originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 626 published on 12 January 1974.

Caracalla about to be killed by Julius Martialis, a personal officer of his bodyguard, by Tancredi Scarpelli

In his powerful, monumental classic work, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the famous historian Edward Gibbon wrote:

“If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.”

The Emperor Domitian was followed by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonine Pius and Marcus Aurelius. They reigned in the second century AD – Gibbon’s “happiest period in the world.”

But after the death of Marcus Aurelius, Gibbon drops his curtain. For after Marcus came the Emperor Commodus.

And although there were still nearly three centuries of the Roman Empire to go, things from that moment on began to decline.

Commodus, from whom the beginning of the bad years can be dated, was the 19-year-old son of Marcus Aurelius. He reigned as Nero had done – evilly and corruptly – and placed his court favourites, who were worthless men, in the highest offices in the empire. The Romans put up with him for 12 years – then, on the last day of the year 192, he was assassinated.

Publius Partinax, his successor, dismissed all the favourites and looked set to rule Rome wisely. But after only three months he upset the praetorian guards, who turned upon him and murdered him in his palace.

Who would now rule mighty Rome? The praetorians, feeling their new power, offered the empire to whichever of two ambitious senators would pay most for it. The highest bid was put in by Didius Julianus, but the final indignity was prevented by a revolt of the legions who declared resolutely: “This great empire will not be auctioned like a chattel.”

In the resulting civil war the man who emerged triumphant was Septimus Severus, brilliant soldier, even more brilliant student of literature. It was a sad commentary on the woeful state of the Senate that, of all the contenders for the Emperor’s throne, Severus, the cleverest, was the one they favoured least. Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about children’s literature originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 625 published on 5 January 1974.

George Macdonald once walked down London’s Regent Street in full Highland Dress quite unaware of the stir he was causing among the passers-by

The night was dark and stormy and the waves crashed on to the shore as George MacDonald strode near the water, revelling in the noise and smell of the North Sea and the wild winter wind. He knew he should not be out on such a night, for his health was not good, but he found storms so exhilarating that it had been impossible for him to resist this one any longer:

It was 1843, and George, aged 19, was a student at King’s College, Aberdeen. He was a sensitive and romantic young man and loved to wander by the sea, reciting poetry to himself. Such amusement had the added advantage of being free, and for George, who was so poor that he sometimes used thick slices of raw carrot instead of buttons on his waistcoat, that was very important!

Having no money was nothing new for George MacDonald. He was born in 1824 and his childhood in the Scottish highland town of Huntly had been very simple. As very few people in the neighbourhood were any better off at that time, their own poverty did not greatly disturb the six MacDonald boys. As long as George and his five brothers could roam freely over the wild countryside they never minded their shabby clothes.

The saddest part of George’s childhood was that his mother died when he was only 8 years old, and although his father was very kind and generous, George never got over the loss of his mother at so early an age.

After he had gained his Master of Arts degree at Aberdeen, George took a job cataloguing the books in the library of one of the huge northern castles. He had always hoped to be able to study medicine, but he was not strong enough to work and earn money to pay for the course. Without such an income the expense of going to Germany, the best place for medical studies in those days, was far beyond his means.

Yet the summer George spent in the castle library had many compensations. For the first time in his life he was able to browse through a great selection of books, both in English and other languages. Of these the ones he liked best were the novels and poetry of the romantic writers, published in England and in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century. Read the rest of this article »