Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
George Calderon c.1901
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George Calderon, 1912
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Captain of the 11
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Recent Comments
- John Pym on Two anniversaries We are all, followers and occasional contributors, beholden to you, Patrick, for reminding us for ten years that the past is worth remembering and for keeping alive the... (August 17, 2024 at 1:06 pm)
- Patrick Miles on A second Family Bible Very many thanks for fleshing that point out -- and so entertainingly! (I love your reference to creative writing courses, which are a phobia of mine.) Although several... (August 2, 2024 at 11:03 am)
- Laurence Brockliss on A second Family Bible When I say that the British Republic of Letters was dead by 1880, I don't mean to imply that thereafter there were no men and women outside universities, institutes and... (August 2, 2024 at 9:19 am)
- Patrick Miles on A second Family Bible Thank you for devoting valuable time to writing this fascinating Comment. If I may say so, it is awe-inspiring to see the author of a monumental work standing back from that... (July 31, 2024 at 5:32 pm)
- Laurence Brockliss on A second Family Bible Male Professionals in Nineteenth Century Britain was a new departure for me. For most of my adult life I have worked on seventeenth and eighteenth century France. It is also... (July 24, 2024 at 11:31 am)
Category Archives: Modern parallels
Alan Coren touches root
Giles and Victoria Coren have done a magnificent job in selecting and presenting these 420 pages of their late father’s writings 1960-2007, very many of which are masterpieces. I hope they will not mind me invoking paragraph 8.7, sub-section a(ii), … Continue reading
Brexit: a modest theory
The Times digest of events in the Great War and Mike Schuster’s Great War Project continue to come down the wires once a week, together with scores of daily Tweets from the Imperial War Museum, from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, from … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Battle of Mons, Battle of Passchendaele, Battle of the Somme, Belgium, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, Brexit, British Expeditionary Force, commemoration, comments, EU Referendum, Europe, Mike Schuster, Paul Cummins, The Great War, The Times, Tom Piper, Winston Churchill, World War I
3 Comments
Dulc(e) et decor(um) est…
I have always been uncomfortable with what I take to be the popular interpretation of Wilfred Owen’s poem Dulce et Decorum est. My first experience of it was in about 1962 from the lips of our young English teacher, a … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged A.J.P. Taylor, Alan Clark, British Expeditionary Force, commemoration, comments, Dulce et Decorum, Edward Thomas, George Calderon, Henry Newbolt, Horace, Jessie Pope, Joan Littlewood, kitchen sink drama, Laurence Binyon, Rome, scansion, Seamus Heaney, The Great War, Wilfred Owen, Wilfred Owen Association (France), World War I
12 Comments
Russia (concluded)
A hundred years ago today Red Guards began occupying key installations in St Petersburg. By early tomorrow morning the Winter Palace had been infiltrated and the Provisional Government arrested. The Bolsheviks, a party of fanatical, fascistic Utopians, subsequently seized power … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Alexander Navalny, Andrei Amal'rik, biographies, biography, Bolshevik coup, Bolshevik Party, Bolsheviks, Cheka, comments, Communism, Democratic Movement, dissidents, Duma, Edmund Burke, emigration, genocide, George Calderon, German Federal Republic, Irish Potato Famine, John Hamilton, KGB, Kittie Calderon, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Moskovskii Komsomolets, Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, nationalism, paranoia, Progress Party, Red Guards, Russian Revolution, secret police, St Petersburg, United Russia Party, Vladimir Putin, Winter Palace
Leave a comment
Russia (to be concluded)
My favourite Soviet dissident was Andrei Amal’rik (1938-80). He was short, he had suffered physically during two terms of exile in Siberia, but he was very squarely built and radiated resistance and survival. His black hair was cut in what … Continue reading
Russia (continued)
Chapter four of my biography, ‘Who Had He Been?’, relates amongst other things what George did in Russia between 12 October 1895 and the summer of 1897. I think it will be a revelation to a lot of people. It … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary, Uncategorized
Tagged Alexander III, Anton Chekhov, ARLS, Armistice Festival, biographies, biography, Clara Calderon, comments, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.W.F. Hegel, George Calderon, George Orwell, Joseph Stalin, Khodynka Field, Kittie Calderon, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Lev Tolstoi, Monthly Review, Moscow, Nicholas II, Olga Novikoff, Pall Mall Gazette, Percy Lubbock, Petr Kropotkin, Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii, St Petersburg, Standard, The Great War, Vladimir Putin, W.T. Stead, World War I, Ypres
2 Comments
Russia (to be continued)
There is something I dread at dinner parties: being asked about ‘Russia’. I hope and pray, pray and hope, that no-one has heard I was a ‘Russianist’ in another life, lived in Russia under the Communist regime, smuggled for … Continue reading
Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Alexander Pushkin, Andrei Sakharov, Andrei Voznesenskii, Bolshevik coup, Boris Pasternak, comments, dinner parties, Fedor Dostoevskii, Fedor Tiutchev, George Calderon, Joseph Brodsky, Khodynka, Lev Tolstoi, Mongol Invasion, Nicholas II, October Revolution, Osip Mandel'shtam, Petr Viazemskii, Russia, Russianists, Vladimir Putin
Leave a comment
Is a dog literally…forever?
An alternative title to this post would be: ‘Why are there no cats’ cemeteries?’ Three weekends running we have visited local stately homes that were inhabited in the Edwardian period, and each of them had a Pets Cemetery in its … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged 'Kay's Crib', animal souls, Archie Ripley, biographies, biography, Bunty, cats, comments, Dardanelles, dogs, Elizabeth Ellis, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Ginger, John Polkinghorne, Jones, Kittie Calderon, Mary Hamilton, Nina Corbet, Percy Lubbock, Pets Cemeteries, Russian Orthodoxy, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Tommy, White Raven, World War I
12 Comments
Proto-Poldark?
Many followers will have realised, I think, that I kept my previous post in pole position for a month because I thought it might give my last batch of prospective publishers a good idea of the book’s scope and, dare … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged 'Q', Arthur Quiller-Couch, Bruce Richmond, Clare Hopkins, comments, Cornish novel, Cornishness, Cornwall, Daphne du Maurier, David Bran, Derwent May, genre, George Calderon, Gilbert Murray, Helen Dunmore, Ivan Turgenev, kailyard school, Morley Roberts, novel, Percy Lubbock, Poldark, Times Literary Supplement, topos, Trescas, Virginia Woolf, Zennor in Darkness
Leave a comment
Edwardian love, sex and the ‘T’other’
The Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook 2017 is undoubtedly right to intone the mantra ‘edit, review, revise and then edit again’, but when you have read your 420-page typescript as many times as I have in the last six months, and made over … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Acton Reynald, Alice Keppel, Anita Leslie, appearances, Archie Ripley, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, biographies, biography, comments, Dardanelles, Diana Souhami, discretion, Emmetts, Foxwold, George Calderon, homosexuality, John Pym, Kittie Calderon, Lesbia Corbet, Lily Langtry, Marcel Proust, monogamy, Mormons, Nina Astley, Nina Corbet, Paul Boyer, secrecy, sex, spin, T'other, Tahiti, The Duchess of Duke Street, The Edwardians, The Great War, The Victorians, Third Battle of Krithia, Tom Quinn, visitors books, Walter Corbet, William Rothenstein, World War I
2 Comments
A P.S. to paradox
After the flights of fancy of my previous post, I ought to make it clear that what really interests me about paradox is (1) why were Edwardian writers, particularly George Calderon, so mad on it, (2) is it yet another … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged amateurism, Bertolt Brecht, biographies, biography, Bryan, comments, Cromwell: Mall o'Monks, Fabian Society, fun, Geminae, George Bernard Shaw, George Calderon, James Wren, Jim Al-Khalili, Lao Tsu, Oscar Wilde, paradox, Raymond Smullyan, Revolt, Taoism, The Fountain, The Lieutenant's Heroine, The Two Talismans, wu wei
2 Comments
It makes you think
An anniversary has just passed: three years ago on 30 July I posted my first entry on Calderonia. I have just asked my blogmaster to analyse the rather confusing statistics generated daily by WordPress, in order to compile a list … Continue reading
Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged 'real time', Andrew Tatham, biographies, biography, blogs, Calderonia, Clare Hopkins, commemoration, comments, Dardanelles, Gallipoli, George Calderon, haikus, James Miles, journalism, Kittie Calderon, Krithia, marketing, reviews, Tahiti, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Trinity College Oxford, Unicorn Publishing Group, Wikipedia, World War I, Ypres
Leave a comment
Own a commemorative masterpiece
I first wrote about the above book on 10 February 2016 . I suggest going now to http://www.groupphoto.co.uk/the-book for Andrew Tatham’s own description of it and how it came about. As you will see, it has been praised to the skies by communicators … Continue reading →