How long ago does something have to have happened for you to consider it history? BBC History Magazine recently ran a poll, and 59% of people said that history was anything older than a decade or less, including 31% saying it could be something that happened a second ago. Obviously, as a writer on the subject I'm interested by this as it affects what I cover, and I'm interested in your comments. How close to the present day do you think 'history' comes?

Britain's Bletchley Park was a centre for Allied code-breaking during World War 2, and some commentators have claimed their work helped shorten the war by years. Recently the thousands of surviving people who worked at Bletchley were awarded medals, the delay partly due to the secrecy which surrounded the project for many years. I wanted to highlight this article from Silicon.com for two reasons. Firstly because it contains many quotations from staff and is revealing. For instance, the Colossus code-breaking machine got so hot everyone worked in its room in short sleeves. I also wanted to mention it because it's nice to see a technology site pay tribute to the pioneers of modern computing.

The British press have published recollections of a former British soldier in World War 1 which reveals the tale of a twelve year old boy. The memories come from George Maher, who lied about his age to enlist for the British army when he was only 13, and was sent to the front line trenches during the Battle of the Somme. He broke down during the conflict and his true age was revealed, at which point he was locked up in a train with other boys who had also lied. One, unnamed in the report I read in the Telegraph, was only twelve, and had also lied about his age. Mayer recalled "The youngest was 12 years old. A little nuggety bloke he was, too. We joked that the other soldiers would have had to have lifted him up to see over the trenches." This would make the boy the youngest soldier known to have served in the British army during the war.

As I've mentioned audio and visual takes on the Berlin Wall recently, it's time for some good old fashioned text. We have an introduction to the subject, but if you want to take your reading further, how about this interview from Stanford University. It features a question and answer session with James Sheehan, a history professor, and Amir Eshel, a German Studies professor. Questions include 'Which facets of Cold War history do you find most compelling?' and 'From the perspective of your research, what do you feel are the most lasting implications of the Berlin Wall today?'

 Last week I spoke about a podcast on the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall. This week I'd like to talk about a project in a different media. Flickr is a file hosting and sharing website and a new project has been started on it called 'Experience History: Berlin 1961 - 1989'. It asks you to submit photographs you have of Berlin during that period, when the wall divided the city. Not just pictures of the wall, although those would certainly be evocative, but any life in the city. While I'm partly interested in this because of the chance to see history - there's a good photo of the kind of signs used to divide the different sectors - a post on their dedicated blog had a particular resonance: "If you were living or visiting Berlin at that time, this is a wonderful excuse to rediscover your old slides and dust off those photo-filled shoe boxes that are lurking under your bed." My father travelled behind the 'Iron Curtain' as a child, and has boxes of slides, although none of Berlin. If you have something to show, or just want to look, this is the blog with the details.

The widespread reputation for France as a country which loves wine and produces many wine varieties might be something of a cliché if it wasn't also largely true. Now Professor Paul Cartledge is hoping to settle the debate about who first introduced wine into France, by arguing it was Greek traders in 600 BC, not Etruscans or Romans. A press release from his university (Cambridge) summarises his points: "two...swing the argument firmly in the Greeks' favour. First, the Greeks had to marry and mix with the local Ligurians to ensure that Massalia survived, suggesting that they also swapped goods and ideas. Second, they left behind copious amounts of archaeological evidence of their wine trade (unlike the Etruscans and long before the Romans), much of which has been found on Celtic sites." The settlement of Massalia is present day Marseille. It does sound convincing...

I've been convinced of the educational value of the podcast for several years now, and was interested to hear of a new set of files devoted to the Berlin Wall by iMinds. Unlike the other podcasts I've spoken about on here, you have to pay for it, but having listened to them I think they're worth it for the right person. Basically, it's a set of six thematically linked podcasts commemorating and explaining the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Each is a little over eight minutes long. The wall itself is well covered, and there's a fair examination of the differences between east and west.

The material is introductory: there's nothing for those already familiar with the subject, but plenty for newcomers. There's a lot of repetition between the segments - for instance, much of the first three minutes of the eight minute 'Fall of the Berlin Wall' is covered elsewhere - but if you're learning about it for the first time this is useful reinforcement. Of course, it can be slightly off putting if you're listening to them all in one go, but one strength is that this isn't a lecture you need a full hour for, but something split into short segments you can spread over a week.

The facts and interpretations are good, and I only had two minor problems: the background music will be a matter of taste, but I found it intrusive. Equally problematic is it's unclear - at least in my package - in what order you should listen to the podcasts for optimum understanding. Those problems aside, I was very pleased with it, even more so by the fact the package of six costs $3.99, which is only just a small step above free. Overall, I think it's good for the beginner and priced accordingly. I hope future sets will have more of a consistent flow between the units, but I also hope this model is more widely adopted; there are students who would benefit greatly from hearing this. iMinds cover other areas of European history, and other - sometimes very esoteric - subjects, but I haven't heard those and can't comment. You can find them at the iMinds site.

A couple of years ago I reported on the excellent '12 Byzantine Rulers' podcast from Lars Brownworth. I'm pleased to pass on that he's now covering a new, but equally interesting, subject in the form of the Normans. Just do a search on 'The Norman Centuries' in iTunes or visit the main site and you'll be away. I've not heard any yet, but I'm sure they'll be equally good, and the source material is excellent, but somewhat overlooked in the popular mind.

The exact origins of Christopher Columbus, the man whose voyage to the Americas began a new era of European conquest abroad, have long been debated. Now a professor of linguistics has entered the debate. Estelle Irizarry, of Georgetown University, has examined over a hundred examples of Columbus' writing and discovered that he uses a grammatical tool - a slash - which at the time was peculiar to only Catalan speaking areas of Iberia, leading to the conclusion that Columbus was a Catalan, or at least raised in that region.

Irizarry goes further, arguing that the reason he was unclear about his origins - a fact that publishers should be happy about - was because he was a 'converso', a person born into a Jewish family who later converted to Christianity. The converso's were frequently under suspicion, and people did indeed try to hide their original religion. Medieval News goes into a bit more depth, but if you're really interested you should look at Irizarry's book 'Christopher Columbus: The DNA of his Writings'.

Benito Mussolini is best known for being a fascist Italian dictator who people think made the trains run on time (he didn't, but that's a great idea for a future Historical Myths piece...) Before that he was a socialist, and between those two, during the later years of the First World War, he was a pro-war journalist. New research published in a history of British spying, as reported in this Guardian piece, has revealed that Mussolini was paid a £100 a week by British spies to write pro-war articles to persuade the nation to remain in the war, equivalent to about £6000 today. He also used local thugs to rough up opposition and stop strikes. So, on the one hand, Mussolini was a British agent, on the other hand Britain was paying Mussolini to use propaganda and violence for political ends, practicing techniques he'd later use to gain power and which would influence Hitler.