History is NOT more or less bunk, despite what Henry Ford said. In fact he probably only made the comment it in the hope that no-one would then listen to future historians when they said things like “Did you know that Adolf Hitler kept a photograph of Henry Ford in his study?”

There is one problem with history however – there is an awful lot of it. Everyone and everywhere seems to be full of it. This presents a historian with a problem – how do we understand what’s going on? How do we make sense of all this….stuff?

Rather than try to produce another blog on a big History Of Everything, which won’t actually include everything but rather consist of another series of lists that are impossible to remember, The Interesting Bits is more of a selection box – a didactic mixture of historical delicacies – stories, events, facts (and a few salacious rumours) which will go no way whatsoever towards helping the reader to pass his or her GCSE History exam.

They have no greater meaning, no direction and no overarching theme beyond being, I hope, worthy of note, perhaps even memorable and reminding us that the past was no less peculiar than the present. If it must have a purpose then I suppose it might help in pub quizzes, possibly.