Tag Archives: Laurence Binyon

Two anniversaries

Commemoration of the tenth anniversary of this blog was elided. On 30 July 1914 George Calderon arrived on the Isle of Wight to spend a holiday with the Pym family and I began the blog on 30 July 2014 with … Continue reading

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The magnificent Mary Ann

Long-term followers of Calderonia will recall that I had always had a theory that the person who taught George to speak Russian credibly before he set out for St Petersburg in 1895 was a ‘Mrs Shapter’, but in my biography … Continue reading

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Grow old they shall not

It is the time of year again when I tussle with the question of how George’s friend Laurence Binyon’s half-line ‘They shall grow not old’ should be spoken (or mutely read), what it means depending on how you speak it, … Continue reading

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A TLS review!!!

I was rendered soundless and motionless last Thursday when a stalwart subscriber emailed to tell me that a full-length review of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius had appeared that morning in The Times Literary Supplement. A Zen moment indeed. For consider: … Continue reading

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Thank you, Blackwell’s of Oxford!

One day, perhaps, I will describe how my whole post-7 September marketing strategy was upset and I had to re-focus immediately on my potential Russianist readership worldwide… Thank you to ALL Russianists everywhere who have responded magnificently! I know there … Continue reading

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Guest post: Alison Miles, ‘Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship’ by Andy Friend

This superbly illustrated book was published in 2017 by Thames & Hudson in association with the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, where Andy Friend is a curator. It starts with an introduction by Alan Powers (another Ravilious expert) entitled ‘A Star in … Continue reading

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DnA

Longer-term followers of Calderonia will be aware of my preoccupation with Edwardian ‘dilettantism’ and ‘amateurism’. Laurence Binyon, Martin Shaw and Percy Lubbock went out of their way to stress that George was not a dilettante, and the word ‘amateur’ was … Continue reading

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Far End draws closer

On 26 January I blogged about the house Far End at Kingham in Oxfordshire, which I had heard about for the first time from Mrs Mary Lowe, whom we traced as the copyright holder for unpublished works of the American … Continue reading

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Far End: a new Calderonian world

The greatest pleasure to have come out of the hair-tearing ordeal of obtaining permission to publish quotations from scores of letters to George and Kittie written a hundred years ago (see 17 April 2017) has been to correspond with Mrs … Continue reading

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An Edwardian Christmas

Happy Christmas to All Our Readers, and thank you for following Calderonia into its fourth year! At Heathland Lodge, George and Kittie’s home from 1901 to 1912 in the Vale of Health, they always staged a large family Christmas, despite … Continue reading

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Dulc(e) et decor(um) est…

I have always been uncomfortable with what I take to be the popular interpretation of Wilfred Owen’s poem Dulce et Decorum est. My first experience of it was in about 1962 from the lips of our young English teacher, a … Continue reading

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A not-paradox, a not-paradox, a most ingenuous not-paradox

In my post of 8 October 2016 I discussed George Calderon’s love of paradox and suggested that the ‘self-referential’ paradoxes in his plays might have been influenced by his following ‘developments in set theory in the 1900s, as he was an … Continue reading

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Empires end like this…

There are two reasons that obtaining Permissions has taken so long, in my case at least (see 17 April and 20 April). First, although I rapidly earmarked the sixteen ‘major’ sources of quoted unpublished material in my biography, e.g. William Rothenstein, … 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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‘…you may touch them not.’

Over the last two years, I have been asked why I chose Wilfred Owen’s line ‘Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not’ as the epigraph to Calderonia; why I am apparently fond of the poem; whether I … Continue reading

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