The Roman poet Catullus described Saturnalia as “the best of times” — he didn’t even have to offer a caveat, like the Christmas-obsessed Charles Dickens did in his novel Great Expectations. Saturnalia was just straight-up awesome.
A 15th-century medieval manuscript, one of the ‘great books of Ireland’, is returning to its Irish roots almost 400 years after it was captured in a siege.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a German composer and pianist, who is arguably the defining figure in the history of Western music. Born in December 1770, he was baptized on the 17th. As baptisms customarily took place the day following birth consensus is that the world’s greatest composer was born December 16, 1770. The earliest recorded piece that Beethoven composed is a set of nine piano variations, composed in 1782.
You may find it hard to believe, but what you’re seeing in the picture above is actually a self-operating, programmable machine, capable of writing letters and words with a quill pen, that’s still functioning after a quarter of a millennium.
For several decades now, it has become normality not only for us, the Western world, but in all parts of the world, that women have a fixed job in the working world, that they have to go to school, that they have to make money.
In Britain, the couple was banned from turning on Christmas lights worth $ 27 000. Too many people wanted to see their beautiful scenery.
This time of year, there are Christmas wreaths adorning everywhere imaginable—from doors and fences to lampposts and windows—even the front grille of the car! How did a round bit of greenery come to symbolize the holidays?
Black British actor Jodie Turner-Smith is to play Anne Boleyn, wife of English King Henry VIII whom he had beheaded, in a three-part psychological thriller commissioned by TV station Channel 5.
Elton John spoke for many people when he said: ‘I regard all pop music as irrelevant in the sense that people in 200 years won‘t be listening to what is being written and played today. I think they will be listening to Beethoven.’
I have nothing against the Welsh. After all, as man and boy, I was blissfully happy in this beautiful land of someone else’s father. But not everyone agrees. Their most famous lyricist, Dylan Thomas once said, ‘Land of my Fathers? They are welcome to it.’
Michael Walsh Stories and Books 
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