How Finnish Survived: The Unlikely History of Europe’s Loneliest Language
No relatives, no state and no written form for centuries, yet Finnish outlasted two empires and ended up shaping Tolkien’s Elvish. The history of Europe’s loneliest language.
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What Would Lord Haw-Haw Make of Nigel Farage’s Bromance with Trump?
History has a habit of rhyming. In 1939 William Joyce sat in front of a Berlin microphone and broadcast Nazi propaganda to Britain. In 2026 Nigel Farage flew to Mar-a-Lago to lobby against British foreign policy. The mechanism is identical. Only the ideology has been updated.
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How Finland’s ancient rituals became modern wellness trends
Ancient Finnish rituals — from sauna steam to icy plunges. Before wellness had hashtags, Finland had habits. Long before anyone said “mindfulness,” Finns were quietly practising it, in saunas, in forests, and occasionally in holes cut into frozen lakes. It’s easy to think of these as quirky northern customs, but most are older than the…
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The Real Stories Behind Iconic Album Covers
The story Iain Macmillan tells goes like this: ten minutes, a stepladder, and a policeman holding back traffic on a north London street. Six photographs taken. One chosen. Paul McCartney happened to be barefoot. And within months of the album’s release, a significant portion of America was convinced that Paul McCartney was dead. Album covers…
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The forgotten early life of the Hollywood sign
Welcome to another “turns out” moment: The iconic Hollywood sign actually said “Hollywoodland” from its installation in 1923 to 1949. You’re welcome. The Hollywood sign was initially built by a real estate company and advertised free space to build, as the name suggests. Building the sign was a huge project for its time at a cost of $21 000…
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How Finland went from Europe’s poorest country to its happiest
In the winter of 1867, lakes and rivers across Finland remained frozen well into June. The average temperature in Helsinki that May was 1.8°C — the coldest on record, eight degrees below normal. The rye had rotted in the fields. Within three years, roughly 270,000 Finns were dead: about eight and a half per cent…
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Britain’s Greatest Political Eccentrics Throughout History
By the time John “Mad Jack” Mytton arrived at his own dinner party riding a live bear — in full hunting costume, naturally — his guests had learned to expect the unexpected. The bear, unimpressed by the formalities, bit him through the calf. Mytton considered it one of the more reasonable evenings that year. Britain…
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The history of British protest: from Peterloo to punk
On the 16th of August 1819, somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 people gathered peacefully at St Peter’s Field in Manchester to demand parliamentary reform. They brought their families. Some wore their Sunday best. The local magistrates, watching from a nearby house, decided this constituted a threat to public order. Within minutes, cavalry had charged into…
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Sisu: The Untranslatable Finnish Concept That Won a War
The Soviet Union invaded Finland on 30 November 1939 with 21 divisions — around 450,000 men — expecting to wrap the whole thing up in a fortnight. Stalin apparently wanted it done in time for his 60th birthday in December. The Finns had roughly 300,000 poorly equipped soldiers, no meaningful air force, and an economy…
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Madder than most? Eight writers who suffered from mental illness
Western civilization hasn’t kicked the nasty old habit of stigmatizing mental health in different ways. Except in the arts and literature, maybe. Creatives are allowed to be odd, at least in retrospect. A few words of warning: One needs to tread carefully around this subject to not enable a culture of self-fulfilling prophesies around eccentric…
