If you haven't already, go out now and buy Conn and Hal Iggulden's "The Dangerous Book for Boys". It's like a selection of the best articles from all the Eagle Annuals, with the occasional contemporary comment. It contains all the information that the national curriculum denies to our children: The Laws of Cricket, Grammar, Knots, how to build a treehouse or make a bow and arrow or hunt and cook a rabbit, Morse Code, other codes and ciphers, secret ink, history including Thermopylae, Hastings,Waterloo, Balaclava, Nelson, Scott, coin tricks, dog tricks, astronomy, marbles, common British trees, to name but a few. Eat your heart out Margaret Hodge and the rest of Blairite blather, bullshit, balderdash and bollocks !
Two quotations from the book:
Girls:
You may already have noticed that girls are quite different from you... as a general rule, girls do not get quite as excited by the use of urine as a secret ink as boys do.
The British Empire:
[The idea of liberty] ... remains the most distinctive feature of the Empire... I do not mean to claim that all British Imperialists were liberals: some were very far from it. But what is striking about the history of the Empire is that whenever the British were behaving despotically , there was almost always a liberal critique of that behaviour from within British society". Macaulay and Mill, you are not forgotten.
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