…and many booksellers are doing mail order,’ writes Susan Hill in The Spectator. I should say they are! Click the prompt at the bottom of this post to buy my blockbuster biography from Sam&Sam while stocks last!
Obsessed with self-image, spin, media, travel, sport, new technology, feminism, the trade unions, relations with Europe, populism? Yes, that’s us! But it was also true of our ancestors the Edwardians — the Brits who lived in that very turbulent channel in our nation’s history, the Edwardian Age of roughly 1897-1916.
There has never been a period in the life of Britain when democratic discourse was as vibrant, exciting and individualistic…it very nearly blew the country apart, writes Patrick Miles. It was the time when the modern nation was born. To understand the Edwardians is to understand more of OURSELVES.
There are very few books that can take you into the Edwardians’ mindset as effectively as Patrick Miles’s George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, because George Calderon (1868-1915) was the quintessential Edwardian — an all-rounder, a man for all seasons, a polymath of genius, or what we would call today a master of the portfolio career.
Using George and Kittie Calderon’s archive discovered by him in a Scottish attic, Patrick Miles has seamlessly reconstructed the action-packed story of Calderon’s traumatic time as a journalist in Russia, his clandestine courtship, his comic novels, his nervous breakdown, his life on Tahiti, his brilliant reviews for the TLS, his Communitarian political activism, his career in the New Drama, his determination to fight at the Front in 1914 despite being over age, and his death at Gallipoli. The book also focusses on Calderon’s heroic wife and her lifetime relationship with another woman.
George Calderon is best known as the first modern British Russianist and the man who introduced Chekhov’s plays to the British theatre; but the mission of this first full-length biography is to show that ‘there is far more to George Calderon than his Chekhovian legacy’. As a Russianist, writer and theatre man himself, Patrick Miles has what one reviewer has called ‘a natural empathy for his subject’ — an empathy with Edwardianism.
THE STORY OF GEORGE AND KITTIE IS ONE THAT HUNDREDS HAVE ALREADY FOUND AS ABSORBING AND ENJOYABLE AS FICTION. TO BUY A COPY OF THIS FINE LIMITED EDITION CLICK ON THE LINK THAT FOLLOWS THESE EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS:
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘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
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
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
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George Calderon, 1912
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?
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Captain of the 11
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
George Calderon c.1901
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
‘People are reading an awful lot…
…and many booksellers are doing mail order,’ writes Susan Hill in The Spectator. I should say they are! Click the prompt at the bottom of this post to buy my blockbuster biography from Sam&Sam while stocks last!
Obsessed with self-image, spin, media, travel, sport, new technology, feminism, the trade unions, relations with Europe, populism? Yes, that’s us! But it was also true of our ancestors the Edwardians — the Brits who lived in that very turbulent channel in our nation’s history, the Edwardian Age of roughly 1897-1916.
There has never been a period in the life of Britain when democratic discourse was as vibrant, exciting and individualistic…it very nearly blew the country apart, writes Patrick Miles. It was the time when the modern nation was born. To understand the Edwardians is to understand more of OURSELVES.
There are very few books that can take you into the Edwardians’ mindset as effectively as Patrick Miles’s George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, because George Calderon (1868-1915) was the quintessential Edwardian — an all-rounder, a man for all seasons, a polymath of genius, or what we would call today a master of the portfolio career.
Using George and Kittie Calderon’s archive discovered by him in a Scottish attic, Patrick Miles has seamlessly reconstructed the action-packed story of Calderon’s traumatic time as a journalist in Russia, his clandestine courtship, his comic novels, his nervous breakdown, his life on Tahiti, his brilliant reviews for the TLS, his Communitarian political activism, his career in the New Drama, his determination to fight at the Front in 1914 despite being over age, and his death at Gallipoli. The book also focusses on Calderon’s heroic wife and her lifetime relationship with another woman.
George Calderon is best known as the first modern British Russianist and the man who introduced Chekhov’s plays to the British theatre; but the mission of this first full-length biography is to show that ‘there is far more to George Calderon than his Chekhovian legacy’. As a Russianist, writer and theatre man himself, Patrick Miles has what one reviewer has called ‘a natural empathy for his subject’ — an empathy with Edwardianism.
THE STORY OF GEORGE AND KITTIE IS ONE THAT HUNDREDS HAVE ALREADY FOUND AS ABSORBING AND ENJOYABLE AS FICTION. TO BUY A COPY OF THIS FINE LIMITED EDITION CLICK ON THE LINK THAT FOLLOWS THESE EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS:
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘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
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
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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