Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Captain of the 11
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
George Calderon, 1912
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George Calderon c.1901
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.Recent 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: John Aubrey
Cogitations of an indexer
A profound thank you to all who commented or emailed me about the illustrations to my biography. Nearly everyone expressed a preference for having them in the text as close as possible to their mention, so that is what I … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary
Tagged 'The Dead', Ada, biographies, biography, Charles Dickens, comments, computer programs, Dante Alighieri, Edward Garnett, Edward Lear, Edward VII, geological terms, George Calderon, Helen Smith, indexes, James Joyce, Jenny Uglow, John Aubrey, Joseph Conrad, Kittie Calderon, Marcel Proust, Nina Corbet, Occam's Razor, Ruth Scurr
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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
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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
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
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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
‘O, fallacem hominum spem!’
This tag from Cicero, meaning ‘Oh how deceptive is men’s hope!’, may be heard on the lips of Chekhov buffs when disappointed about something, followed sotto voce by Kulygin’s line: ‘Accusative with exclamation…’ (Act 2, Three Sisters). It is certainly appropriate … Continue reading
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
De-appling
In my 22 January post I explained the meaning of the Edwardian verb ‘to apple’. I mentioned that five lines in George’s letter to Kittie of 10 May 1915 were ‘appled out’ and I was following up ‘forensic programmes’ for … Continue reading
Ruth Scurr’s exhilarating experiment
In my post of 6 March I discussed an essay by Ruth Scurr about biography that had just appeared in the Guardian Review. Her essay stirred up a whole hive of issues that the modern biographer should be aware of and needs … Continue reading
The biographer discombobulated
I am greatly entertained by Mistress Ruth Scurr’s new book John Aubrey: My Own Life. It contains 433 pages. My honoured friend Mr William Harvey warns me that I shall acquire an impostumation if I sit reading it much longer. I … Continue reading
Biography and the limits of non-fiction
I keep dipping into Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life. It’s very compulsive reading, but I don’t have time at the moment to let it run away with me as I would wish. Nevertheless, I’ve read enough both of the … Continue reading
‘Bifurcation’ and ‘chronotopia’ again
Those who have been on my journey since 30 July 1914/2014 will remember that six weeks into it (12 September) I wrote about the problem I was having of holding in my head the two activities of writing the blog … Continue reading
Time and the biographer
I have received a long and very interesting letter from John Dewey, author of the superb Mirror of the Soul: A Life of the Poet Fyodor Tyutchev (2010), commenting on my various posts over the last three months that touch on … Continue reading
Who was George Calderon (again)?
I first posted on this subject last year, 13 September. The reason I am touching on it again now is that a follower has very kindly sent me a cutting from the International New York Times of 23 January which is … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Personal commentary
Tagged Albert Murray, Anton Chekhov, Ayana Mathis, biographies, biography, Charles Dickens, Donald Rayfield, Edward Thomas, Ernest J. Simmons, George Calderon, Jane Austen, John Aubrey, Patrick Miles, Ronald Hingley, Rupert Brooke, Ruth Scurr, Siegfried Sassoon, Thomas Mallon, Tom Wolfe, Vita Sackville-West, Wilfred Owen, William Shakespeare
2 Comments
A biographer in-spires
I have just read a long article by Ruth Scurr, ‘Lives, some briefer than others’, in last Saturday’s Guardian Review (28 February), which I thoroughly recommend to followers if they can get it, along with a piece by Stuart Kelly, ‘Enter … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, biographies, biography, Daniel Defoe, Donald Rayfield, Fort Brockhurst, George Calderon, Helen MacDonald, John Aubrey, Kittie Calderon, Michael Holroyd, Park Honan, Percy Lubbock, Robert Graves, Ruth Scurr, Stuart Kelly, T.S. Eliot, Tahiti, The Brave Little Tailor, TLS, TLS blog
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Is all biography also autobiography?
As long-term followers will know, the above question worries me (in the canine sense). The reason my Introduction went through so many versions was that half of my test-readers thought there was too much of me in it and not enough … Continue reading →