You have my deepest sympathy. Love & strength to you & your family at this very difficult time

That doesn’t even make sense: language can very often be a barrier between cultures (especially if you’re as terrible at French grammar as I am…)

2/2 But this data on enslaved people themselves, derived from the registers of the ‘amelioration’ period is a yet more significant resource on captives & for their descendants:

www.theguardian.com/news/2026/se...

And Dickens (David Copperfield)

The question kind of answers itself: Jonathan Swift has a fantastic observation on just this sort of problem in Gulliver’s Travels, when Gulliver is shown a sentence-spewing machine that would allow “the most ignorant Person” to write books “without the least Assistance from Genius or Study”

So sorry to hear this Andy, it sounds awful!! Don’t have any pets I’m afraid (if I did it would be a fudge-coloured cavochon puppy with expressive eyes) but sending best wishes for a swift recovery!

also it kind of feels like he’s assuming all the soldiers will be male

Glad to be of help! I wrote a short History Today article on the Secret of the Loch film a year or two back, & got rather deep into the contextual research for it (the first Nessie cuddly toy was made around Jan 1934, sold at Selfridges)

(The cover design of the Loxton & Prothero book does not exactly inspire confidence, but the content is every bit as rigorous as a serious scholar of fake news phenomena could wish)

… has an excellent & scholarly chapter on the Nessie phenomenon which credits the King Kong film (1933) with partially inspiring early visualisations of Nessie.

Actually there is an earlier story in the Inverness Courier on 2 May 1933 (Nessie’s first feature film outing, The Secret of the Loch was released a year later around the monster’s “first birthday”). if you’re researching Nessie & fakery then Loxton & Prothero’s “Abominable Science!” …