A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George Calderon, 1912
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Captain of the 11
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
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.
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George Calderon c.1901Recent 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)
Tag Archives: biographies
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
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels
Tagged Armistice Day, biographies, biography, British Legion, commemoration, George Calderon, Kennington, Kittie Calderon, Remembrance Sunday, The Great War, two-minute silence, White Raven, World War I
Leave a comment
Rachel Cusk and George Orwell: Transitions to…where?
As I walk into my local Waterstones, the first thing that catches my eye, straight ahead at one o’clock as it were, is three bookcases labelled NEW BIOGRAPHY. Other key subjects are ranged all around, but none of them … Continue reading
Percy Lubbock: ‘Esoteric and intimate portraiture’
One of Ruth Scurr’s aims in John Aubrey: My Own Life was to ‘produce a portrait’ of Aubrey, but naturally she did not write it in the biographical genre known as ‘literary portrait’. This genre seems to have grown out … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Archie Ripley, biographies, biography, character, comments, Earlham, empathy, George Calderon, Golden Square, Henry James, John Aubrey, John Masefield, Katy George, Kittie Calderon, literary portraits, Lytton Strachey, Marcel Proust, Mary Cholmondeley, Percy Lubbock, Piers Brendon, Ruth Scurr, William Caine
Leave a comment
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
Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged biographies, biography, Clare Hopkins, comments, diaries, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, Hilary Mantel, John Aubrey, John Aubrey: My Own Life, Maximilien de Robespierre, Michael Holroyd, Ruth Scurr, Trinity College Oxford
Leave a comment
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
3 Comments
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
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment
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
2 Comments
From the diary of a countrywoman
In December 1922 Kittie moved from Hampstead with her housekeeper Elizabeth Ellis to ‘Kay’s Crib’, a Victorian three-bedroomed house with a fair amount of ground to it at Sheet, near Petersfield, in Hampshire. She told a friend of Percy Lubbock’s: … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Personal commentary
Tagged 'Kay's Crib', Alan Lubbock, biographies, biography, Brasted, Bunty, Captain Charles Evelyn Pym, Captain Gilbert Piggott, Charles Letts's Diary, Clara Calderon, comments, Dardanelles, diary, Eliza Stewart, Elizabeth Ellis, Foxwold, Gallipoli, gardening, George Calderon, Gertrude Corbet, Hampshire, Hampstead, Helen Lubbock, Kittie Calderon, Mrs Stewart of Torquay, Nina Astley, Nina Corbet, Percy Lubbock, Petersfield, Sheet, The Croft, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Torquay, Violet Pym, World War I
Leave a comment
The limits of biography
I do not know why the popularity of autobiographies and biographies has mushroomed in 21st century Britain. I wish someone would tell us. Meeting and communicating with people makes the world go round, of course, so perhaps the fact that … Continue reading →