by Gordon | May 22, 2011 | Alamein (politics)
When Britain first went to war in North Africa, it was not with Germany, but with Italy. Hostilities had been initiated by Italy launching an invasion of Egypt from its colony in Libya, and though British and Commonwealth forces managed to repel the attack,...
by Gordon | May 21, 2011 | Exploration
Gerhard Rohlfs was born near Bremen in 1831. His career was blundering and calamitous but a dogged determination won him some remarkable achievements: he was the first to discover the Great Sand Sea though he failed to breach it; the first to visit the remote oasis of...
by Gordon | May 20, 2011 | Alamein (people)
In 1956, on a bitterly cold day, in front of Les Invalides in Paris, Susan Travers stood to attention in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion, the only woman every to have been accepted into the elite corps. A lone general, Marie-Pierre Koenig, strode across the...
by Gordon | Apr 20, 2011 | Exploration
When a tragic love story is woven around the lives of real people and a film is made of it with powerful performances acted out in a landscape of haunting beauty, fiction trumps fact, artistic licence prevails and a landscape becomes part of our...