Captain of the 11
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George Calderon, 1912
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
George Calderon c.1901
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906Recent Comments
- Patrick Miles on Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ Many, many thanks for reprising, Johnnie, for I know how busy you are. How serendipitous that you had just seen a 'live' performance of Murnau's b&w Sunrise! I gather from... (March 14, 2025 at 10:21 am)
- John Pym on Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ March 8, 2025: Last evening, I watched a digital transfer of a black-and-white movie, made by an expatriate German in California nearly a hundred years ago, in a packed town... (March 10, 2025 at 4:36 pm)
- Patrick Miles on Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ Your response here is (obviously) deeply informed... Thank you very much indeed. In comparing the coach ride to Simferopol in Heifitz's film with the chariot race in Ben-Hur... (March 5, 2025 at 10:01 am)
- John Pym on Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ Black-and-white camerawork was, I suspect, as natural to the director of The Lady with the Little Dog as breathing in and out or eating his breakfast. I doubt that he was... (February 28, 2025 at 11:01 pm)
- Patrick Miles on Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ We are deeply favoured and honoured to publish on Calderonia the eminent film critic John Pym's magnificent tribute to Heifitz's film The Lady with the Little Dog, perfectly... (February 24, 2025 at 10:56 am)
Category Archives: Modern parallels
Ruth Scurr: ‘Fatal Purity’ and dangerous identity
The most innovative biography of 2015 was Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life, and it is still reverberating (it was published in the U.S. last month and following this Scurr lectured on it in America). Long-term followers of Calderonia … Continue reading
Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged biographies, biography, Bolsheviks, Claire Harman, Communism, empathy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Heathcliff, history of ideas, history of political thought, identification, Jane Eyre, John Aubrey, Lenin, Maximilien de Robespierre, Rochester, Ruth Scurr, Stalin, The French Revolution, The Russian Revolution, William Wordsworth, Wuthering Heights
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Claire Harman: An exemplary modern biography
In September 1910 George Calderon visited the World’s Fair in Brussels with Walter Crum, the Coptic scholar. He wrote to Kittie from there: ‘I just met an old gentleman in the street who knew the headmistress in Villette and the … Continue reading
Biography brainstorm
For the next ten days, I shall be blogging only about biography. On 21 October Harvey Pitcher, the doyen of Chekhov studies in this country, will present a guest post about George Calderon’s famous Introduction to his pioneering translations of The … Continue reading
Kittie Hamilton
I have returned from holiday fired up to put the last tittle on my biography by the end of November and get copies to the interested publishers immediately afterwards. This means writing the Afterword (‘Who George Calderon Was’), radically improving the … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged anti-suffragism, Archie Ripley, Arts and Crafts, biographies, biography, Calderon family, comments, Conservative Party, Dardanelles, Eliza Stewart, feminism, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Hove, John Hamilton, Kennington, kenosis, Kittie Calderon, Liberal Party, Mary Simson, Mrs Stewart of Torquay, Nina Astley, Nina Corbet, Petersfield, Pym family, suffragism, Tahiti, The Great War, The Red Cross, Third Battle of Krithia, trade unionism, VAD, William Rothenstein, World War I
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Guest post: Alison Miles, ‘Living with George and Kittie since the mid-1980s’
When I first heard about George Calderon it was the mid-1980s and my time was mainly taken up with small children. However I realised that something big was starting when Patrick went to Scotland to visit an attic full of … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Alison Miles, biography, Cambridge, Cap Gris Nez, comments, Eastcote, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth Pym, Foxwold, George Calderon, Jack Pym, Jim Corbet, Karen Spink, Kennington, Kittie Calderon, La Sirene, Moreton Corbet, Nina Corbet, Patrick Miles, Petersfield, Robin Britcher, Roland Pym, Scotland, Sheet, Sir Walter Raleigh, Vincent Corbet, White Raven
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‘Edwardian bastards’ — a personal note
Periodically I have to remind myself that in the 1950s I met plenty of Edwardians, in the sense of people whose character and values were formed in the longer Edwardian period of 1897-1916 and who were thought of as being … Continue reading
Afterword ‘spoilers’?
Veteran followers of this blog will know that my estimates of how long it is going to take to complete any given piece of writing connected with my biography of George and Kittie Calderon are usually out by a factor … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Afterword, Alison Miles, Anita Leslie, Baden Powell, biographies, biography, comments, Edwardians, George Calderon, George Cornwallis-West, Juliet Nicolson, Kittie Calderon, Marie Lloyd, Paul Thompson, psychology, Roy Hattersley, Samuel Hynes, spoilers, Yvonne Bell
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Future biographers of George Calderon…
Even at this late stage, ‘things keep coming up’. It took me, as predicted, two pretty full days to input to the text of my biography (167,000 words) the 1000+ corrections and revisions that emerged from my two complete readings … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, biographies, biography, British Library, Christianity, comments, Dardanelles, EPMOS, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Grant Richards, Humanism, Kittie Calderon, Kropotkin, Laurence Binyon, Lydia Yavorskaya, Paul Boyer, Percy Lubbock, Petr Kropotkin, Spinoza, Tahiti, Taoism, The Brave Little Tailor, The Great War, theism, Third Battle of Krithia, William Caine, World War I
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Guest posts on ‘Calderonia’
The next post, which will appear on Monday 15 August, will be by Mr John Pym, son of Jack Pym (1908-93) who featured as a child in my very first post of 30 July 1914 (30 July 2014) and was … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Archie Ripley, biographies, biography, Captain Charles Evelyn Pym, comments, Edwardians, Foxwold, fun, George Calderon, guest posts, Jack Pym, John Pym, Kittie Calderon, Victorians, Violet Pym
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‘Solved!’
I am so relieved to have completed the re-hoover of my 165,000-word typescript in six working days — approximately a fifth of the time my disastrous ‘final’ hoover took (see ‘O, fallacem hominum spem!’ of 27 July). I must say, … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Afterword, biographies, biography, comments, Downton Abbey, George Calderon, Introduction, introductions, Kittie Calderon, readers, reading public, The Great War, World War I
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Ruth Scurr: ‘A book in which he is still alive’
If in her first biography Ruth Scurr’s identity approached that of Robespierre as a ‘friend’, in John Aubrey: My Own Life (2015) she seems to have merged her identity with Aubrey altogether. The fundamental problem of modern biography, Scurr has written elsewhere, … Continue reading →