THE BREEZER Newsletter

Giuseppe Garibaldi gathered a thousand men from Quarto — ‘I Mille’, ‘The Thousand’ —and slipped out to sea. They wore red shirts, carried whatever weapons they could lay their hands on and headed out to challenge a Bourbon army tens of thousands strong. The Breezer - A weekly newsletter from Steve Winduss at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me exploring historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming week. 15th March 2026. "Beware the Ides of...

The absurdity reached its peak on Christmas Day 1870, when Voisin’s, one of Paris’s finest restaurants, served ‘stuffed donkey’s head, elephant consommé, roast camel, antelope terrine and bear chops in pepper sauce’. The Breezer - A weekly newsletter from Steve Winduss at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me exploring historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming week. 25 January 2026. Happy Sunday !I turn on the news with trepidation these days....

He wrote endless letters, attended her every performance and behaved in the audience with the subtlety of a man who'd just caught fire. In England, we would call this stalking. The French called it love. The Breezer - A weekly newsletter from Steve Winduss at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me exploring historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming week. 30th November 2025. Happy Sunday Reader!One of my most cherished memories as a teenager was...

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother... The reality was probably a little more prosaic. But whatever Henry may have lacked in Shakespearian eloquence, he more than made up for in raw courage. The Breezer - the historical joyride for a curious mind: A weekly newsletter from Steve Winduss at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me discovering historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the...

But how to get in? Pilecki had a solution. It was elegantly simple and utterly deranged: get himself arrested in Warsaw to be dispatched to Auschwitz, then set up an internal resistance movement, collect intelligence, escape and report back. The Breezer - the joyride for a curious mind: A weekly newsletter from Steve Winduss at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me discovering historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming week. Add to that updates...

However, it wasn’t until sometime in the 1700s that stories from the - newly named - Tower of London Menagerie started to get a little weird - visitors could apparently gain admission by paying threepence or by bringing their live domestic pets to be fed to the lions. The Breezer - the joyride for a curious mind: A weekly newsletter from Steve Winduss at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me discovering historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming...

Tyrrell steadied himself, drew back his nocked bow and fired at the startled stag. The arrow ricocheted off a tree and plunged deep into William’s chest. William fell from his horse and, for a few lingering moments, bled to death on the forest floor. The Breezer - the joyride for a curious mind: A weekly newsletter from Steve Winduss at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me discovering historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming week. Add to that...

Sure enough, the bullets bounced off the armour, prompting the apocryphal cry from an officer, “He’s the Devil!”, to which Kelly replied, “No, I am Ned Kelly”..... The Breezer - the joyride for a curious mind: A weekly newsletter from Steve Winduss at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me discovering historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming week. Add to that updates relating to the podcast, a touch of humour and a dash of "lots more". 22nd...

Hieronymus was better known as Baron von Münchhausen, a German nobleman and Captain in the Russian Cavalry, and would become the inspiration for Rudolf Erich Raspe's ‘The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen’. The Breezer - the joyride for a curious mind: A weekly newsletter from Steve Winduss at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me discovering historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming week. Add to that updates relating to the podcast, a...