Tuesday, 12 January 2021

13 January: St Hilary of Poitiers

Today is the feast day of St Hilary of Poitiers. Here are 10 things you might not know about him:

  1. His name comes from the Latin word for happy and cheerful.
  2. He was born in Poitiers around the end of the 3rd century AD. He was born into a noble family of pagans and received an excellent pagan education, including Greek to a high level.
  3. It was his knowledge of Greek which allowed him to study the Bible, and it was through his studies that he was converted to Christianity.
  4. Unlike most saints, he was married, and had a daughter, Abra. His wife and daughter were also converted and Abra went on to become a saint in her own right.
  5. In around 350 or 353, he was elected Bishop of Poitiers – a landslide victory, since he was very popular with the Christians there.
  6. He spent four years in exile in Phrygia. It’s not know for sure why that was, but it’s likely to have had something to do with the politics of religion at the time. Hilary was sometimes referred to as the "Hammer of the Arians", the Arians being a sect which didn’t believe in the divinity of Christ but were very powerful, so it was likely it had something to do with his opposition to them. Hilary also had it in for orthodox Christians and excommunicated some of them.
  7. During his exile, he studied the Arians in detail, which only made his opposition to them more effective once he returned home. He co-operated with Martin of Tours in combating Arianism and the founding of the monastery of Ligugé, 8 km south of Poitiers.
  8. Because he was a writer, his symbols are three books and a quill pen. His liturgical colour is White.
  9. He is the patron saint of lawyers and gives his name to the spring terms of the English and Irish Law Courts and Oxford and Dublin Universities. The Hilary term starts on or around 13 January, his feast day.
  10. According to Jerome, Hilary died in Poitiers in 367.


New Year New Reading Challenge?

I can help. Here are links to books which meet potential criteria:

A title with three words

A title with six words

A book with a number in the title

A book with a colour in the title

Short story collections/A book with a green cover

A book published in the last year/during lockdown

A book you can finish in a day/A book under 200 pages

A book featuring characters from a deck of cards

A Book set during Christmas

A book with a place in the title

A Debut novel


A book with a plant or flower on the cover/A book about siblings

A book with a female villain or criminal

Includes space travel

Features Royalty

Books featuring skiing or snowboarding

A book with the Olympic games in it

A book with a bird in the title

A book featuring a secret society

A book featuring time travel/alternative dimensions
Raiders Trilogy:

Books featuring superheroes

Books featuring ghosts

From an Indie Publisher/Self published/An author you've not read before/A female author/A genre you wouldn't normally read/A book outside your comfort zone/A book by an author with your initials and your initials are JH
All of them!

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Monday, 11 January 2021

12 January: Pierre de Fermat

This date in history saw the death, in 1665, of mathematician Pierre de Fermat. Here are 10 facts about him:

  1. He was born in Beaumont-de-Lomagne, France. His father, Dominique Fermat, was a wealthy merchant dealing in agricultural products such as Wheat, Wine, cattle, and animal hides. His mother’s name was Claire de Long. She came from an aristocratic family. She died when Pierre was seven.
  2. His date of birth isn’t known, but it’s though to have been late 1607 or early 1608. August 1601 is sometimes quoted, but this was another Pierre de Fermat – a half-brother who died in infancy.
  3. There are no records about his education until he went to the University of Orléans at the age of around 15 to study civil law and graduated three years later. Soon after he moved to Bordeaux where he became an attorney in the high court.
  4. Although he contributed much to the field of mathematics, he worked as a lawyer and maths was just his hobby. In his 20s, he became a councillor at the Parlement de Toulouse, one of the High Courts in France, which made him a member of the nobility and gave him the right to call himself Pierre de Fermat rather than simply Pierre Fermat. He held this office for the rest of his life.
  5. He married his wife’s fourth cousin, Louise de Long, in 1631. He was in his 20s at the time, she was 15.
  6. He wasn’t just talented at maths, either. He was fluent in six languages (French, Latin, Occitan, classical Greek, Italian and Spanish). He wrote poetry, too, in several different languages.
  7. He became friends with a number of influential mathematicians of his time and corresponded with them, but never published any of his own work. Hence his contributions to the field come from his letters and notes he scribbled in the margins of his books. The latter were only discovered after he died.
  8. His famous last theorem wasn’t the last one he came up with, but is rather known as his last theorem because it remained unproven when all his others had been proved. He wrote it in 1637 and it says the equation an + bn = cn cannot be true for any three numbers if the value of n is more than 2. It is sometimes referred to as Fermat's conjecture, and was found by his son five years after he died, scribbled in the margin of his copy of Arithmetica (a book by a Greek mathematician called Diophantus, published around 250AD). He famously added that he had proved it, but there wasn’t room in the margin of the book to write down the proof.
  9. In Fermat’s time, people didn’t have much use for pure mathematics. Mathematicians were often quite secretive about their work, so there were often disputes about who was the first to come up with, or prove, a theory. Probability theory, however, did have its uses. Blaise Pascal wrote to Fermat in 1654 about a problem some professional gamblers had presented him with. If a game of Dice was interrupted and couldn’t be completed, how should they share out the stake Money if, say, someone had bet on throwing a six within eight throws of a die, but had only managed three throws (without throwing a six). Fermat solved this using maths; Fermat and Pascal are today recognised as the co-founders of probability theory.
  10. Pierre de Fermat died aged 57 or 58, on January 12, 1665 in Castres, France. He’d been working at the local court three days before he died, and it’s not known what caused his death.


New Year New Reading Challenge?

I can help. Here are links to books which meet potential criteria:

A title with three words

A title with six words

A book with a number in the title

A book with a colour in the title

Short story collections/A book with a green cover

A book published in the last year/during lockdown

A book you can finish in a day/A book under 200 pages

A book featuring characters from a deck of cards

A Book set during Christmas

A book with a place in the title

A Debut novel


A book with a plant or flower on the cover/A book about siblings

A book with a female villain or criminal

Includes space travel

Features Royalty

Books featuring skiing or snowboarding

A book with the Olympic games in it

A book with a bird in the title

A book featuring a secret society

A book featuring time travel/alternative dimensions
Raiders Trilogy:

Books featuring superheroes

Books featuring ghosts

From an Indie Publisher/Self published/An author you've not read before/A female author/A genre you wouldn't normally read/A book outside your comfort zone/A book by an author with your initials and your initials are JH
All of them!

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Sunday, 10 January 2021

11 January: Oberon, Moon of Uranus

On this date in 1787 Oberon, a moon of Uranus, was discovered by William Herschel. 10 things you might not know about it.

  1. It’s the second largest moon of Uranus and the ninth largest in the solar system. Oberon is 8.4 times smaller than Earth.
  2. It orbits at about about 584,000 km from the planet – the farthest away of any of Uranus’s major moons. A significant part of its orbit is outside the planet’s magnetosphere.
  3. Oberon takes about 13 and a half days to orbit Uranus and is tidally locked with it.
  4. It was named after the king of the fairies in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Herschel’s son, John.
  5. Its surface features are also named after characters in Shakespeare. Its largest known crater is Hamlet, and some of the others are MacBeth, Romeo, Caesar, Othello, Falstaff and Lear. An unidentified substance covers the floors of many of Oberon's craters. Astronomers don’t know what it is but theorise that it could be dirty Water which welled up after the impact. The surface in general is dark and reddish in colour.
  6. There’s also one mountain, which doesn’t seem to have a name, but is 4 miles (6 km) high.
  7. There could be more mountains and larger craters, since only 40% of the surface has been mapped, by Voyager 2 in 1986. There are no plans to send any other spacecraft anywhere near Oberon.
  8. Its composition is thought to be about half ice and half rock, and it might have a layer of liquid water between the mantle and the core. Oberon has no detectable atmosphere and no magnetic field.
  9. So there’s probably no life there, except in the imagination of various science fiction writers. In Treasure on Thunder Moon by Edmond Hamilton, Oberon is the home to a semi-sentient alien race of "Flame-Throwers". In Paolo Aresi's novel Oberon there is a secret Russian base there, and in the TV series Starhunter, there’s a maximum security prison there. In Doctor Who, there is an order of knights based there, called the Grand Order of Oberon.
  10. Oberon is mentioned in Pink Floyd's song Astronomy Domine.

New Year New Reading Challenge?

I can help. Here are links to books which meet potential criteria:

A title with three words

A title with six words

A book with a number in the title

A book with a colour in the title

Short story collections/A book with a green cover

A book published in the last year/during lockdown

A book you can finish in a day/A book under 200 pages

A book featuring characters from a deck of cards

A Book set during Christmas

A book with a place in the title

A Debut novel


A book with a plant or flower on the cover/A book about siblings

A book with a female villain or criminal

Includes space travel

Features Royalty

Books featuring skiing or snowboarding

A book with the Olympic games in it

A book with a bird in the title

A book featuring a secret society

A book featuring time travel/alternative dimensions
Raiders Trilogy:

Books featuring superheroes

Books featuring ghosts

From an Indie Publisher/Self published/An author you've not read before/A female author/A genre you wouldn't normally read/A book outside your comfort zone/A book by an author with your initials and your initials are JH
All of them!

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Saturday, 9 January 2021

10 January: Barbara Hepworth

 Born on this date in 1903: Dame Barbara Hepworth, English sculptor, considered among the greatest sculptors of the twentieth century. From 1925 to her death in 1975, Hepworth made more than 600 works of sculpture.

  1. Her full name was Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth. She was born in Wakefield. Her father Herbert was a civil engineer who became County Surveyor in 1921.
  2. She knew from the age of 12 that she wanted to be a sculptor. She attended the Leeds School of Art in 1919. She won a scholarship to the prestigious Royal College of Art (RCA), where she studied from 1921 to 1924.
  3. While she was studying in Leeds, she made a lifelong friend – a fellow sculptor whose name was Henry Moore. They developed a friendly professional rivalry and influenced each other’s work.
  4. She married twice. Her first husband was also a sculptor, John Skeaping, who she first met at RCA. They travelled together in Italy when Hepworth was awarded a West Riding Scholarship for one year’s travel abroad. They married in 1925 and had one son, Paul, who died in an air crash while serving in the RAF in Thailand. The couple used to exhibit their work from their London flat. They divorced in 1933. In 1934 she met English abstract painter Ben Nicholson. He was married, but they had an affair which produced triplets, Sarah, Rachel, and Simon. Ben divorced his wife and married Barbara in 1938. This marriage lasted until 1951, when they divorced.
  5. It was in 1931 that she started making sculptures with holes in. Her first such work is the celebrated sculpture Pierced Form. Her friend Henry Moore is also known for sculptures with holes in, but it was Hepworth who did it first.
  6. She didn’t just make sculptures. She is famous for drawings, too. Her most famous drawings are of surgeons at work, focusing on their hands. Those came about after her daughter Sarah was in hospital in 1944. She befriended a surgeon called Norman Capener, who allowed her to watch surgeons at work, after which she produced about 80 drawings. There was, she said, ‘a close affinity between the work and approach both of physicians and surgeons, and painters and sculptors’.
  7. Her largest sculpture is Single Form, which is displayed outside the United Nations headquarters in New York. It is 21 feet high and weighs over 5 tonnes. It was created in memory of her friend, Dag Hammaskjold, the 2nd Secretary-General of UN. He was killed in 1961 en route to cease-fire negotiations and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously.
  8. When the second world war broke out, she moved with her husband and children to St Ives in Cornwall, where they became part of a community of artists. In 1960, she bought a former cinema and dance hall, the Palais de Danse, which gave her the space to make bigger sculptures. She was given the Freedom of St. Ives award in 1968 in acknowledgement of her contributions to the community.
  9. She was made a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1958 and a DBE (Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1965.
  10. She died in 1975, aged 72, as a result of a fire in her studio at Trewyn, which is now the Barbara Hepworth Museum and is managed by the Tate gallery.


New Year New Reading Challenge?

I can help. Here are links to books which meet potential criteria:

A title with three words

A title with six words

A book with a number in the title

A book with a colour in the title

Short story collections/A book with a green cover

A book published in the last year/during lockdown

A book you can finish in a day/A book under 200 pages

A book featuring characters from a deck of cards

A Book set during Christmas

A book with a place in the title

A Debut novel


A book with a plant or flower on the cover/A book about siblings

A book with a female villain or criminal

Includes space travel

Features Royalty

Books featuring skiing or snowboarding

A book with the Olympic games in it

A book with a bird in the title

A book featuring a secret society

A book featuring time travel/alternative dimensions
Raiders Trilogy:

Books featuring superheroes

Books featuring ghosts

From an Indie Publisher/Self published/An author you've not read before/A female author/A genre you wouldn't normally read/A book outside your comfort zone/A book by an author with your initials and your initials are JH
All of them!

More details can be found here
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Friday, 8 January 2021

9 January: Amon Ra

In traditional Egyptian astrology, people born around now are under the sign of Amon Ra. 10 things you might not know about this Egyptian god:

  1. He started out as two separate gods, Amun and Ra, which merged into one deity during the eighteenth dynasty.
  2. The word Amun means “the hiddenness of divinity” while Ra means “Sun”.
  3. The chemical ammonia and the marine animal ammonite derive from the Greek form of Amun.
  4. In art, Amun was often shown as an ape or a Lion, and Ra as a falcon or beetle. Both were sometimes depicted as rams.
  5. In some literature, Ra is described as an ageing king with golden flesh, silver bones, and Hair of lapis lazuli.
  6. He was the head honcho of the Egyptian pantheon of gods, often referred to as “one one” and “no second” and the creator god. He was the ancient Egyptian god of fertility and life. Unlike other gods, whose mythology states they were the offspring of other gods and “born” at some stage or another, Amun Ra was always there.
  7. He was considered to be the father of the pharaohs. The must-have fresco for any Egyptian king was one showing Amun-Ra fathering them, because they believed this helped prove their right to the throne.
  8. Amon Ra’s worshippers became extremely powerful, almost as powerful as the pharaoh himself, which is partly why Akhenaten decided to declare Aten the one and only god, instead. Once Akhenaten died, however, the cult of Amon Ra re-asserted itself.
  9. In the hymn of Amon Ra, he is addressed as Lord of Truth, Father of the Gods, Maker of Men, Creator of all Animals, Lord of Things that are, Creator of the Staff of Life.
  10. In popular culture, Ra is the alien who enslaves the human race in the film Stargate. Indiana Jones uses the Staff of Ra to locate the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

New Year New Reading Challenge?

I can help. Here are links to books which meet potential criteria:

A title with three words

A title with six words

A book with a number in the title

A book with a colour in the title

Short story collections/A book with a green cover

A book published in the last year/during lockdown

A book you can finish in a day/A book under 200 pages

A book featuring characters from a deck of cards

A Book set during Christmas

A book with a place in the title

A Debut novel


A book with a plant or flower on the cover/A book about siblings

A book with a female villain or criminal

Includes space travel

Features Royalty

Books featuring skiing or snowboarding

A book with the Olympic games in it

A book with a bird in the title

A book featuring a secret society

A book featuring time travel/alternative dimensions
Raiders Trilogy:

Books featuring superheroes

Books featuring ghosts

From an Indie Publisher/Self published/An author you've not read before/A female author/A genre you wouldn't normally read/A book outside your comfort zone/A book by an author with your initials and your initials are JH
All of them!

More details can be found here
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