User:Simon George

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I'm currently an English teacher in Japan and have worked also in the Czech Republic where I translated a general reference work on Bohemian history (Cesky Slovnik Dejin). Despite being a republican by political choice, I am a big fan of biographical history and find monarchy to be useful in breaking history into small manageable chunks. The BASIS of my work often comes from Britannica and the Longmans Chronicle series; but I've also researched into a number of other texts to get the bigger picture. A few examples would be John Julius Norwich's works on Byzantium and Sicily; Sir Steven Runciman's unsurpassed trilogy of The Crusades; D.H. Livermore's History of Portugal; Pal Engel's "The Realm of St Stephen"; Stuart Wolff's "Revolution and Reaction - A History of Italy 1700-1870"; Sir George Hill's "History of Cyprus" and other titles (author's names unfortunatley not to hand) such as "The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France". "The Medieval Crown of Aragon", "The Medieval Spanish Kingdoms"; "The Rise and Fall of the Dutch Republic"; "The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire", "The Cambridge History of Poland"; Freidrich Heer's "Holy Roman Empire"; the Longmans series on Russian and Hapsburg history; "A History of Modern Greece"; "A History of the Scandinavian Kingdoms". Most of my work from Japan is reliant on memory, internet sources and the few English books I can obtain here. When I return to England I will have much better resources to hand and I hope to contribute a lot more to the Wikipedia which I consider to be a project as worthy as Diderot's first "Encyclopedie" in such a profit-generated age. I have some disks of information I transcribed before coming to Japan, but as these are mostly derivative I only intend to place them here on request. .