He’s the Big Bad in season two of the BBC’s Ripper Street, where he gets the West End’s worth of scenery to chew and is generally a lot of fun

Irish travellers are by far the most common migratory ‘gypsy’ people in Britain and Ireland, while Romani people are more common in continental Europe. There’s overlap and mixing between the two as well, but it’s likely the show is drawing on the Irish traveller culture rather than the Romani one.

Another story I love, which may be apocryphal, is that ships carrying Scottish wool to Spain found that the cargo holds designed to carry bulky bales of wool were oversized for the goods they carried back on the return journey to the port of Dundee. This meant that most of the space was wasted, and that the ships were…

I am HERE for the Spartacus reunion! So far we’ve seen Crassus, Naevia, Barca and Cossutius! What gives?

The issue is that (at the time of writing and supreme court case pending) the SNP can’t pull the trigger because they don’t have the powers required. They were relying on angry popular support to force Westminster’s hand which... didn’t really happen, and polls are more or less the same as they were in 2014.

I’m surprised at that from GRRM, if only because I thought both hunts were pretty good character pieces for Viserys and Robert respectively.

Yes, according to him. I was absolutely not being serious but we should start a petition if there’s enough public support for sexy naked Tom

It's Tom Bombadil and I'll fight whoever says otherwise

Weird that Hobbits have ‘brandy’ in their names even before they settled in Arnor after the drowning of Beleriand. I always liked how Tolkien explained that the Brandywine river’s name came from a Hobbit corruption of the name Baranduin that Elendil’s people had given it.

Oh of course! You guys have that funny little regional game with all the commercials don’t you! 

This was an angle picked up in the British press too based on advance screenings of a couple of episodes, but if you watch the whole series there are a couple of gay plotlines that are pretty unambiguous about his sexuality. It’s certainly focussed on Cateriana, but he definitely gets some man candy.

This came out nearly two years ago in the UK and it was a bit of a disappointment compared with Spotnitz’s earlier and much better Medici: Masters of Florence and Medici: The Magnificent.

‘British’ is a geographical term like ‘European’ is, defined by location rather than politics. So unless the SNP have some rather ambitious geological engineering planned, Scotland will continue to be part of Britain regardless.

‘British’ refers to all the countries on the island of Great Britain, so Scots and the Welsh are British as are the English. It’s not just a synonym for ‘English’.

Weird take for someone implying that fans of newer Trek are only pretending to like it to spite people who refuse to believe there is anything more to the franchise than TNG re-runs.

‘Public’ schools are the very oldest private schools in Britain, called ‘Public’ because they date back to the days when most schools were church-run schools that discriminated based on religion and you had to be invited to attend. By contrast, anyone who could afford it could send their child to a Public school.

Yeah, we don’t tend to have AC for the same reason that people don’t have snowmobiles in Huston. You might be able to use it a week a year, but other than that it’s a big sunk cost.

What happens in Texas when it snows a bit?

Hey, I bought this yoghurt fair and square.

We make an exception for that - I went once and it’s just the same as the US, I believe