"This war isn't about territory any more. "It's become a war for survival : someone - either the Star Kingdom of Manticore and its' allies, including us, or the People's Republic of Haven - is going down this time, Your Grace. For good." From a report from the High Admiral of Grayson, Wesley Matthews, to Protector Benjamin of Grayson, at the start of this book. This book, " Flag in exile " by David Weber, is the fifth "Honor Harrington" novel and follows on from " Field of Dishonour " so it is set around two thousand years in the future. Following the shattering conclusion of the private war between Honor Harrington and her lifelong enemy Lord Pavel Young as described in the book " Field of Dishonor, " Honor in in disgrace in the eyes of parliament. She has been expelled from the House of Lords, and the admiralty has been forced to take away from her the command of the battlecruiser Nike, and put her on half-pay. S...

The video below tells the story of a battle in terrible weather in the North sea off Lofoten Island, on the first day of the invasion of Norway by the Nazis, 9th April 1940, in which the World War one vintage battlecruiser HMS Renown attacked, and scored a tactical victory over, two modern German capital ships, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Both sides took damage from the terrible weather as well as from each other. There was some debate, then and since, about whether Scharnhorst and Gneisenau should be considered battleships or battlecruisers. At the time the Royal Navy classified them as battlecruisers because they were optimised and used as very heavy commerce raiders, while the German navy called them battleships because their speed did not come at the price of lighter armour protection. What is not in doubt is that they were very powerful ships and together outnumbered HMS Renown two to one. Both sides had an escort of screening units - destroyers and on the German side the heavy cru...

One of our regular contributors drew our attention to this Fantasia on the Yorkshire Anthem ( On Ilkley Moor Bah't 'at ) by Simon Mayor, arranged for two mandolins, a mandola, and a mandocello. He hadn't previously heard of a Mandocello, and neither had we. But we understand that this is a plucked string instrument of the mandolin family, larger than the mandolin, and is the baritone instrument of the mandolin family. The term does NOT refer to a type of cello played by Mandalorians as in this picture posted  here on Instagram by the Piano Guys. This is the way ... 

Up to the publication of " Field of Dishonor, " in 1994, its' author David Weber would have been described as a military science-fiction writer. He had been the co-creator, with Steve White, of the space combat strategy game "Starfire" and both of them got their start as published authors with collaborative military SF novels set in the Universe of that game. Weber's next half-a-dozen books, including " Path of the Fury" which was later rewritten and extended as " In Fury Born , " the excellent  Mutineer's Moon  which kicked off a trilogy, and the first three novels in the "Honor Harrington" or "Honorverse" series, were also very much military science fiction, although they did include quite a lot of the economic and political background which set up the space battles the protagonists find themselves in. With the publication of this fourth book in the "Honorverse," David Weber took the risk of alienating...

"The straights of Hormuz should be renamed Schrodinger's Straights As they seem to be open and closed at the same time." (Found on X, formerly twitter, today, with variants from David Keyes @DavidMKeyes and others)