Alan Allport
@alanallport
Professor, historian, husband, dad, scouser, gobby. Author of Demobbed (2009), Browned Off & Bloody-Minded (2015), Britain at Bay (2020), Advance Britannia (2025). “Awesome but a bit boring” (RMP). Personal account.
Does anyone happen to know when exactly Zachary Taylor received official news from Washington that hostilities with Mexico had formally broken out in May 1846? I know it was after his battles at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma but otherwise the sources seem unclear. Thanks!
Saw Nolan’s Odyssey. It frames the Trojan Horse as a violation of xenia, the law of hospitality, with Odysseus’s ten years of suffering as payback. It also lands, intentionally or not, right in the middle of the Pentagon’s current cult of “lethality” and its faulty memory of its warrior culture. 🧵
RIP Sam Neill. First and most memorably for me encountered not chasing 🦕 but in the long, strange, disjointed, but compelling espionage drama Reilly: Ace of Spies
Also Eilean Donan castle on the mainland close to Skye, where a quixotic Spanish invasion briefly took place in the (to me anyway) obscure 1719 Jacobite rising.
It was a very Jacobite week. Went on to Glenfinnan which is more famous now as the ‘Harry Potter bridge place’ (which you could hardly see, it was so misty) but which is more notable as the site where Charles Edward Stuart first raised the royal standard in 1745.
Did a little Highland adventure last week and went to Culloden battlefield, furthest northern point I’ve ever been 🐻❄️. Excellent guide interpretation at the site and honestly a very moving historical experience even though to be honest there’s not much there to be seen.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s very weird black comedy Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths takes the piss out of the whole legend rather well.