14 May
I gather, from a reliable source, that access to Calderonia has been blocked in Russia (I nearly said ‘the Soviet Union’). This would explain why no Russian viewers have featured in the stats for months. One can only sigh. Some of us have greatness thrust upon us, but would rather not have. I suppose ‘they’ took exception to some things I said on the occasion of the centenary of the Bolshevik coup. An old dissident comments: ‘It’s worse than in the Brezhnev period, because the technology now enables them to keep far closer tabs on what people are saying and thinking.’ Actually, I think the Putin regime is more repressive all round. Can you imagine it, last year they even banned the British Council, which had been representing our culture in Russia since 1959…
18 May
We have been on Shetland for nine days. Despite email-checking, it is possible to forget everything back home, above all the need to sell books. It was still Spring on Shetland, with masses of daffodils and narcissus in bloom. The air is breathtakingly clean compared with Cambridge and in the fine hot weather it had a sweetness that I think is compounded of grasses, wild flowers and sheep dung. Above all, the rich wildlife — guillemots, puffins, red-throated divers, terns, wheatears, whimbrel, fulmars, seals, trout, orcas — goes about its existence as though humans are not even there. But one could hardly say that it’s an unspoiled paradise. Some islanders, particularly on Yell, have a disarming custom of dumping their old cars in the middle of moorland. Moreover,
The raven hackles
that flutter on barbed fences
are just black plastic.
22 May
We have come back to yet another Eiger of a learning curve: publishing our first book with Amazon as a print on demand paperback. It is just over a year since Sam2 and I submitted my Calderon biography to Clays for production (they fortuitously delivered it on 4 June 2018, the anniversary of George’s death at Gallipoli, and I still think they did a superb job). As some followers will recall, we had been working flat out on typesetting and preparing the book for submission since taking the decision to self-publish on 6 January 2018. Our feet seem hardly to have touched the ground since; it certainly does not feel like almost a year since we set about selling it. And now we have to take a very deep breath and get What Can We Hope For? out to reviewers a couple of months before its publication date of 16 October. Why on earth are we putting ourselves through this?
It’s because eighteen months of approaches to five commercial publishers produced two contracts which were offensive guff and we had to bin them. From every point of view it made more sense to publish What Can We Hope For? ourselves, and Sam2 easily persuaded the authors that an Amazon print on demand paperback was the best option.
The book’s principal author is famous scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne. He is now wheelchair-bound and cannot write anything longer than a page or two. However, his mind is as sharp as ever and his spoken English highly expressive. This book has been compiled from my recorded conversations with John, meticulously transcribed by Sam2, then edited down by me from 60,000 to 31,000 words. It is about John’s eschatological thinking — eschatology being defined at the beginning of the book as ‘the doctrine of the last or final matters, such as [the end of the universe,] death, judgement and the state after death’. Here is a sample page from the typescript:
26 May
I have had some emails about the first entry in my previous post, concerning the shortlisting for the James Tait Black biography prize. (I don’t want to push this, but it would be so much better for the exchange of views, or even an argument, if people could commit themselves to a blog Comment, as John Dewey has.) My correspondents want to know whether I agree with my friend about the mere ‘wokefulness’ of the short list.
It’s true, Akala’s Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire sounds like a Progress Publishers translation of a tract by V.I. Lenin. But what struck me most about the four titles shortlisted is that two of them are autobiographies, one is about ‘the life’ of Marie Colvin, and the fourth resembles an historical novel. Where are Jenny Uglow’s Mr Lear and other blockbuster biographies brought out in 2018 by the big commercial publishers?
Well, it would ill become me to complain, because I have banged on for nearly five years in this blog about how biography should be an experimental genre! Of course, one can dispute whether autobiography, memoir, diaries, letters and fictionalised history are biography, but for Waterstones and increasing numbers of readers they are. I rather doubt that the quality of writing of the shortlisted works is superior to, say, Uglow’s, but wokefulness aside it is difficult not to agree with Dr Simon Cooke, one of the judges of the James Tait Black biography prize, that ‘this year’s shortlist shows the reach and vitality of biographical writing in the centenary year of the prize’.
Finally, I must admit that even in its first decade the prize was not entirely focussed on biography in the strict sense. In 1922 it was won by none other than George and Kittie’s friend Percy Lubbock for his book Earlham — and whatever that is, it’s not a biography. (See George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, pp. 5-7.)
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
LAURENCE BROCKLISS’s review in The London Magazine appears here.
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George Calderon c.1901
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
George Calderon, 1912
Captain of the 11
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
From the diary of a writer-publisher: 3
14 May
I gather, from a reliable source, that access to Calderonia has been blocked in Russia (I nearly said ‘the Soviet Union’). This would explain why no Russian viewers have featured in the stats for months. One can only sigh. Some of us have greatness thrust upon us, but would rather not have. I suppose ‘they’ took exception to some things I said on the occasion of the centenary of the Bolshevik coup. An old dissident comments: ‘It’s worse than in the Brezhnev period, because the technology now enables them to keep far closer tabs on what people are saying and thinking.’ Actually, I think the Putin regime is more repressive all round. Can you imagine it, last year they even banned the British Council, which had been representing our culture in Russia since 1959…
18 May
We have been on Shetland for nine days. Despite email-checking, it is possible to forget everything back home, above all the need to sell books. It was still Spring on Shetland, with masses of daffodils and narcissus in bloom. The air is breathtakingly clean compared with Cambridge and in the fine hot weather it had a sweetness that I think is compounded of grasses, wild flowers and sheep dung. Above all, the rich wildlife — guillemots, puffins, red-throated divers, terns, wheatears, whimbrel, fulmars, seals, trout, orcas — goes about its existence as though humans are not even there. But one could hardly say that it’s an unspoiled paradise. Some islanders, particularly on Yell, have a disarming custom of dumping their old cars in the middle of moorland. Moreover,
The raven hackles
that flutter on barbed fences
are just black plastic.
22 May
We have come back to yet another Eiger of a learning curve: publishing our first book with Amazon as a print on demand paperback. It is just over a year since Sam2 and I submitted my Calderon biography to Clays for production (they fortuitously delivered it on 4 June 2018, the anniversary of George’s death at Gallipoli, and I still think they did a superb job). As some followers will recall, we had been working flat out on typesetting and preparing the book for submission since taking the decision to self-publish on 6 January 2018. Our feet seem hardly to have touched the ground since; it certainly does not feel like almost a year since we set about selling it. And now we have to take a very deep breath and get What Can We Hope For? out to reviewers a couple of months before its publication date of 16 October. Why on earth are we putting ourselves through this?
It’s because eighteen months of approaches to five commercial publishers produced two contracts which were offensive guff and we had to bin them. From every point of view it made more sense to publish What Can We Hope For? ourselves, and Sam2 easily persuaded the authors that an Amazon print on demand paperback was the best option.
The book’s principal author is famous scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne. He is now wheelchair-bound and cannot write anything longer than a page or two. However, his mind is as sharp as ever and his spoken English highly expressive. This book has been compiled from my recorded conversations with John, meticulously transcribed by Sam2, then edited down by me from 60,000 to 31,000 words. It is about John’s eschatological thinking — eschatology being defined at the beginning of the book as ‘the doctrine of the last or final matters, such as [the end of the universe,] death, judgement and the state after death’. Here is a sample page from the typescript:
26 May
I have had some emails about the first entry in my previous post, concerning the shortlisting for the James Tait Black biography prize. (I don’t want to push this, but it would be so much better for the exchange of views, or even an argument, if people could commit themselves to a blog Comment, as John Dewey has.) My correspondents want to know whether I agree with my friend about the mere ‘wokefulness’ of the short list.
It’s true, Akala’s Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire sounds like a Progress Publishers translation of a tract by V.I. Lenin. But what struck me most about the four titles shortlisted is that two of them are autobiographies, one is about ‘the life’ of Marie Colvin, and the fourth resembles an historical novel. Where are Jenny Uglow’s Mr Lear and other blockbuster biographies brought out in 2018 by the big commercial publishers?
Well, it would ill become me to complain, because I have banged on for nearly five years in this blog about how biography should be an experimental genre! Of course, one can dispute whether autobiography, memoir, diaries, letters and fictionalised history are biography, but for Waterstones and increasing numbers of readers they are. I rather doubt that the quality of writing of the shortlisted works is superior to, say, Uglow’s, but wokefulness aside it is difficult not to agree with Dr Simon Cooke, one of the judges of the James Tait Black biography prize, that ‘this year’s shortlist shows the reach and vitality of biographical writing in the centenary year of the prize’.
Finally, I must admit that even in its first decade the prize was not entirely focussed on biography in the strict sense. In 1922 it was won by none other than George and Kittie’s friend Percy Lubbock for his book Earlham — and whatever that is, it’s not a biography. (See George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, pp. 5-7.)
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
LAURENCE BROCKLISS’s review in The London Magazine appears here.
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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