Tag Archives: commemoration

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

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The War

Every day brings another press extract in The Times’s ‘The First World War’ series, every week another email in their history of the war, and the stream of Tweets from the Imperial War Museum, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, historical institutions, the … Continue reading

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Guest post: Clare Hopkins, ‘One Man and his College’

Anyone who has ever watched an episode of Morse or Lewis will know that Oxford Colleges are well supplied with portraits. Founders, archbishops, prime ministers, and Nobel Prize winners gaze grandly down from the panelled walls of Dining Halls. Smaller … Continue reading

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‘He became his admirers…’

W.H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ describes Yeats’s death in January 1939, culminating in: ‘The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.’ I often think the word should be ‘readers’ rather than ‘admirers’, for as Auden himself … Continue reading

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‘The Long Shadow’, War Poetry, and Commemoration

  Faithful followers of this blog will recall my account on 16 December 2015 of Professor David Reynolds’s public lecture ‘Making Peace with the Great War: Centenary Reflections’. I have now read the book behind the lecture (see above) and … Continue reading

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Armistice Day, 1937

The first national two-minute silence was held on Armistice Day 1919. In 1945 it was transferred to the nearest Remembrance Sunday, commemorating the fallen of both world wars. After a campaign mounted by the British Legion, in 1995 the two-minute … Continue reading

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Watch this Space

6/4/16. I have now revised 96% of my book George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. The last chapter, covering Kittie’s life 1923-1950, feels too close still (I finished the second draft only two months ago) to tackle, so I am limiting myself to … Continue reading

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Watch this Space

23/3/16. I have now revised 92% of the typescript of my book. I shall tackle the last two chapters, which cover Kittie’s life 1915-50, after Easter. One reason for leaving them till then is that there are two pieces of … Continue reading

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Watch this Space

Calderonia is an experiment in biography through a blog. It tells the story of George and Kittie Calderon’s lives from 30 July 1914 to 30 July 1915 from day to day as it happened, but exactly 100 years afterwards. It therefore … Continue reading

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Watch this Space

9/12/15. Cambridge Professor of International History David Reynolds’s lecture at the Perse School on 2 December entitled ‘Making Peace with the Great War: Centenary Reflections’, was a virtuoso performance — restrained, relaxed, magisterial, deeply challenging. The audience of about a hundred and … Continue reading

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Watch this Space

23/11/15. I am now reading and digesting every item in Kittie’s archive that relates to the period 1923-50, and it’s immeasurably deepening my understanding of her life in that period, which spans Sheet in Hampshire (1923-34) and Kennington in Kent (1934-48). The … Continue reading

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Watch this Space

16/11/15. I have been reading the copy of The Sayings of Lao Tsŭ (John Murray, 1905) that George Calderon gave his wife Kittie on her birthday, 5 March 1905. I had always known that George was interested in Taoism, but the signs … Continue reading

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Watch this Space

9/11/15. It is a huge relief to have ‘finished writing’ the penultimate chapter, ‘Aftermath and Masterpiece’, of my biography. Although it is only 9000 words long, it has taken me ten weeks to research and write (in pencil). It has been by … Continue reading

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Watch this Space

26/10/15. It was remiss of me, in my last Comment, not to address the first paragraph of Clare Hopkins’s last Comment, which concerned commemoration. Clare began the paragraph by asking ‘Can there ever be a last word on the subject … Continue reading

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Commemoration (concluded)

Since this blog started in July last year, I have taken part in many conversations, both viva voce and online, about followers’ responses to George Calderon’s war experience, to the War as it has been unfolding, and to what I … Continue reading

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‘Tributes’

A Russianist who has read Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory (1921) asks me why I have not posted more tributes to George than my own. The reason is simply that tributes were not published until his death became … Continue reading

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