Most people spent the 1950’s in a mild panic. If you lived in a NATO country, you feared the Soviets nuclear arsenal, and if you happened to live in a Warsaw Pact country, you feared a destructive attack by American and British nuclear weapons. In the world of Cold War [...]
The Last Days of Steam With the possible exception of steam liners, there is nothing to match the romance of steam train journeys. From the earliest Victorian age steam has been a regular fixture in countless romance novels and plays, and for 150 years steam locomotives opened up a new world of exotic journeys, but [...]
The Hero Fortress of Brest The Second World War saw the last days of national fortifications. For centuries European countries had depended on fortified defensive works to keep their borders safe. Forts, or chains of strongholds, that often were a source of considerable national pride and generally considered impregnable. However, with the advent of new [...]
Feel Free in a Tree How about releasing your inner Tarzan (or Jane) by spending your next holiday in a luxury tree house in northern Sweden? The Tree Hotel in Harads, 60km south of the Arctic Circle, offers a selection unique accommodation for design-conscious travelers. The woodland hotel is the brainchild of Swedish entrepreneur Kent [...]
Men in Belted Sweaters In retrospect the 70’s seems a tremendous anticlimax to the 60’s. For the youth, political activism and social involvement gave way to a more introspective lifestyle – a ‘Me’ decade. Sequenced between the more themed 60s and 80s the 70s seems to be a kind of a gap-decade in history [...]
The rise and fall of the Superconducting Collider Anybody with an interest in physics has heard about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A gigantic research facility located deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. LHC is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator potentially capable of smashing subatomic particles together with an energy of 14 teraelectronvolts (7 TeV [...]
The Winchester Mystery House One of the most iconic firearms of the American Wild West was a rifle from the prominent Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Not only was it John Wayne’s favourite rifle, in many ways it was the rifle that won the west – ok, that might be a slight dramatization of actual [...]
