Guest blog: Civil War Oxford (Vanessa Moir, civilwaroxford.co.uk)

The interactive map showing locations associated with court officials, university members, townspeople and guests during the English Civil War (image copyright: civilwaroxford.co.uk)

Vanessa Moir created civilwaroxford.co.uk after being inspired by her university studies and her experience of living in the city. In this guest blog she explains more about its interactive features, the primary sources she's working with, and her plans for the site's future ...

Q&A: Launching the BCW Project (David Plant, bcw-project.org)

The BCW Project website - bcw-project.org

David Plant recently relaunched his encyclopedic British Civil Wars website (british-civil-wars.co.uk) as the enhanced and redesigned BCW Project (bcw-project.org). For over a decade David's site has been an invaluable resource for researchers of the period, and from 2005 has been included in the British Library's UK Web Archive.

I asked David about the original inspiration for the site, how his own interests have developed whilst publishing it, and what's next for the new-look BCW Project ...

Jerome Willis (1928 - 2014)

Jerome Willis as Fairfax in Winstanley (1975).

I was sad to hear of the death of the actor Jerome Willis, who passed away in January. Willis was the only professional actor to appear in Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's Winstanley (1975), where he played Thomas Fairfax, a role he described as a "labour of love" ...