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gregdaly.bsky.social
Jack of all trades, master of some. Dublin-born and Drogheda-based author of Cannae: The Experience of Battle' and editor of ‘1916: The Church & the Rising', Nine-time CMA award winner. One-time future world leader. Mostly tired.
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I’m not entirely sure that that which Jonathan Sacks warned of wasn’t, in fact, a variety of fascism, and I’ve other issues but what he says, but still, there is perception here, and astuteness too: rabbisacks.org/archive/athe...

submitted 19 hours ago • 0 comments

I’ve just had a video shared with me on the other place (well, one of the other places), showing an American having his first spice bag. It was unfortunately underpinned by an ill-chosen advert.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

Enjoyed rummaging this weekend through all the foreign coins I’ve accumulated over the years. Struck especially by the shoddiness of old Hungarian coins, and by coins from countries past - Czechoslovakia, Rhodesia, even Württemberg. I’d not realised I had that!

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

I’m starting to think that many decades of “Thucydides and Polybius are good templates for geopolitics” may have led us astray: rather, the most appropriate classical templates for today are probably Herodotus and Suetonius’s accounts of what happens when nutjobs are at the helm.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Oddly, that was just the third rugby match I’ve watched in the past few years. The other two were against New Zealand in the 2023 World Cup song against England in last year’s Six Nations. Perhaps I shouldn’t watch at all…

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.” George Orwell clearly had trouble sorting his Carcassonne tiles.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Drogheda’s looking well this morning. Onward to the capital, so!

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

I think it would be good if people stopped saying “appeasement” and started saying “collaboration” or “capitulation”. We do have duties to tell the truth, after all. If yesterday will have achieved anything, it might help push people towards that.

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Well, this has been exciting! I’d never seen an otter - well, not for sure - before today. Or heard one, for that matter. Good work, Drogheda.

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Drogheda looked well as I left it this morning, Dublin as I did so this evening.

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

Age yourself with a movie you saw in the theatre.

submitted 17 days ago • 2 comments

Some context, as it's important to remember what Sophie and the White Rose opposed: "Nothing is so unworthy of a nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by a clique that has yielded to base instinct…Western civilization must defend itself against fascism..." 1/10

submitted 18 days ago • 2 comments

“Finally, someone has to make a start. We only said and wrote what many people think. They just don’t dare to express it.” Sophie Scholl, 9 May 1921 - 22 February 1943.

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

Given how there’s no shortage of ancient vase paintings that depict Odysseus’s chums Achilles and Ajax wearing this kind of helmet - including the best vase painting of them all - I think I can live with Odysseus being so clad in a film.

submitted 22 days ago • 1 comment

It was very strange to have a discussion the other day with an old friend who has gone into politics, and for the feeling to grow since that I could not in good conscience ever vote for them. Not because they lack intelligence, integrity, or industry, but because I no longer trust their judgment.

submitted 22 days ago • 0 comments

Having recently reread Nick Davies’s “Dark Heart: A Journey into Hidden Britain”, which shows how stuff painted so often as a legacy of the Blair years was rife through the 1990s, I was glad to read this on Dublin street violence in the 1970s and 80s: comeheretome.com/2014/04/14/v... 1/2

submitted 23 days ago • 1 comment

That there was only one collection of the great Joe Lee's history columns from The Sunday Tribune back in the day always strikes me as a terrible shame. There was material for at least two of them, I'm sure. And we'd be glad of them now. Still, here are four that are good to think with.

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments