Roman Holiday – the perils of a poet in Nero’s Rome After he loses everything he owns in a disastrous flood, former convict, failed farmer, and all-round no-hoper and ne’er-do-well Martin Sparrow heads into the wilderness that is now the Wollemi National Park in the unlikely company of an outlaw gypsy girl and a young wolfhound. Historian Peter Cochrane’s tale of adventure and more often than not, misadventure, set on the middle reaches of the Hawkesbury River at time when two culturally and spiritually disparate peoples collided. It is late summer in 1806, in the colony of New South Wales. Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis as Tom and Hal Martin Sparrow’s Blues

A nostalgic canter through some of my personal favourites on records and in movies. Outlaw songs and outlaw gothic are as much apart if the mythic Wild West as cowboys and gunslingers. My primary criteria were not so much the subject matter, which is diverse, as can be seen from the ten choices (shown here in alphabetical order) but firstly, what I most enjoyed writing and secondly, those I considered the most original insofar as I referenced and republished few other voices, other than direct quotations from the sources I was consulting and books I was reviewing.

In compiling the annual retrospective for 2022, I decided I would put together a list of my favourite posts in each of the categories described above, beginning with the history ones. Politics, literature, music, and memoir are featured – but it is at its most original and informative, a miscellany of matters historical, gathered in Foggy Ruins of Time – from history’s back pages– yes, an appropriation of lyrics from two Bob Dylan Songs. Whilst its scope is eclectic and wide ranging in content In That Howling Infinite is especially a history blog.

The past now beats within me like a second heart. I walk the paths of pioneers who watched the circus start, I wake with runes of mystery of how we all begin, I wear the weave of history like a second skin,

The sport of kings by ce morgan