The real significance of Taranto was to come later.
Here s What You Need to Remember:
“This was Lt. Takeshi Naito, assistant air attache at the Japanese embassy in Berlin. The implications of those sunken battleships were not lost to him.”
It was the hour before midnight when the battleships slept.
Snug in their harbor, cocooned behind layers of anti-aircraft guns and searchlights, the Italian fleet lay peacefully unaware of the fate droning towards them.
Through the dark skies came waves of aircraft lumbering under the weight of the torpedoes they carried. The date was November 11, 1940, the place was the southern Italian port of Taranto, and the battle that ensued that night was the prelude to the Japanese raid at Pearl Harbor.
As the debate around Maggi Hambling’s monument to Mary Wollstonecraft’s legacy reaches its second week, there has been little scrutiny so far of other artworks that commemorate the writer, philosopher and women’s rights advocate, who was famously described as ‘that hyena in petticoats’ by Horace Walpole. Best known today for
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft was a prolific writer, whose publications included a conduct book, a novel, a travel diary, several children’s morality tales, a treatise calling for the abolition of slavery and a history of the French revolution. She lived an unconventional life of courage and conviction. Yet her image has long been fixed in our collective imagination: as the striking, thoughtful woman captured in two portraits by her friend John Opie.
Fifteen famous faces you may not have known were from Cornwall
Cornwall has plenty of characters
Kristin Scott Thomas, who was born in Redruth
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