Actually that's an interesting point (and coincidence) about Archduke Ferdinand. We were discussing him in a recent English class at university (my teacher in that course is second-generation Croatian) and I was the only one who could say who he was and why he was important.

How frightening is that? My mother, who is a college teacher, also says she's had some students WHO HAVEN'T EVEN HEARD OF HITLER.
Sort of makes you wonder whether, through ignorance, we will be doomed to repeat our mistakes.

Spot on with Jacques Brel. What a songwriter, what a satirist. It's worth learning French just for him (unfortunately the translations don't really do it--Le Moribond versus Seasons in the Sun, ugh!!)

I think (pet theory of mine) that if Harold hadn't been killed he might have been able to rally the Anglo-Saxons and we wouldn't have had to put up with an aristocracy based on ideas of Norman ethnic superiority for so long. Anybody ever read an unsettling short story by Kipling called "The Tree of Justice", which deals with an idea like this?

Speaking of people who died before we really got a sense of their true potential, I often wonder what Rupert Brooke would have done after the war. He was a supreme example of the syndrome that makes icons out of people who are reasonably talented and die young.

Sorry for the long and rambling message, but this thread is beginning to get interesting...

Cheers,

Isabel