A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
George Calderon, 1912
Captain of the 11
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
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: Ruth Scurr
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
Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged America, anthropology, autobiography, biographies, biography, cicadas, comments, Cyclops, expansionism, Fedor Dostoevskii, George Calderon, imperialism, Japan, Jizo, John Aubrey, Lafcadio Hearn, Meiji, militarism, nationalism, novels, pornography, Roger Pulvers, Ruth Scurr, The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn, The Unmaking of an American, Yakumo Koizumi
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A real biography
I don’t think I have read a new biography — or any biography — since Helen Smith’s The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett, which I wrote about on 1 June 2018. Given that I was constantly reading biographies as they … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Alessandro Falcetta, Armenia, biographies, biography, Brer Rabbit, Carole Spencer, comments, Congregationalism, Congress for the History of Religions, Corsica, cows, Darwinism, Edward Garnett, existentialism, George Calderon, Helen Smith, Jesus Christ, literary theory, mysticism, Nonconformism, Plymouth, Quakerism, Rendel Harris, Ruth Scurr, Søren Kierkegaard, Times Literary Supplement, William Littleboy, Woodbrooke
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Does computer typesetting produce a ‘chaotic system’?
Like me, I expect you have wondered why a modern commercially published book that is to all appearances superbly produced can neverthless have typographical garbage and weird other phenomena in it, or why odd entries in its Index are consistently … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, butterfly effect, chaology, chaos theory, comments, determinism, garbage, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, glitches, Grant Richards, italics, John Aubrey: My Own Life, morpho butterflies, PDF files, printers, proofs, publishers, random events, roman, Ruth Scurr, Sam&Sam, Sam2, Two Plays by Tchekhof, typesetting
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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
13 Comments
Some notes on orthodoxy
A very happy New Year to all Calderonia’s subscribers, followers, and casual viewers! (If you are one of the latter, please consider subscribing top right.) This is ‘the year’… Following an almost complete absence of response to my last reminders … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged Animal Farm, biographies, Brimstone Press, Charles Dickens, Clays Ltd, comments, design of boats, George Calderon, George Orwell, Jane Austen, Jenny Uglow, John Dewey, John Polkinghorne, orthodoxy, publishers, publishing, Ruth Scurr, Sam&Sam, Victoria Beckham, William Shakespeare
5 Comments
A skipped life
For my taste, this book is the most innovative biography since Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life (see 15 October 2016). Although reviewed positively when it appeared last year, it is so original that I defy anyone to get their head quite round … Continue reading
Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged 'real time', A Life Discarded, Alexander Masters, biographies, biography, Cambridge, diaries, fiction, graphologists, John Aubrey: My Own Life, Laura Francis, Laurence Sterne, private detectives, Ruth Scurr, Simon: The Genius in my Basement, Stuart: A Life Backwards, Tristram Shandy
4 Comments
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
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, Artemis Cooper, autobiography, biographies, biography, Boris Johnson, Cazalets, Claire Harman, comments, Constance Sutton, Damian Collins, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Fatal Purity, Frederick the Great, George Calderon, Harvey Pitcher, John Aubrey: My Own Life, Kittie Calderon, Matthew Dennison, Maximilien de Robespierre, Peter Ackroyd, Philip Sassoon, Richard Chartres, Ruth Scurr, The Great War, Thomas Carlyle, Vita Sackville-West, William Shakespeare, Winston Churchill, World War I
2 Comments
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
‘An obscure mixture of feelings’
I try reading the London Review of Books about twice a year, but each time end by flinging it in the bin: it’s not a literary publication, it’s a political one written by amateur politicians. And what I can’t take about … 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
From the diary of a writer-publisher: 21
7 January Almost themed, one could say, in Calderonia, Cambridge academic Ruth Scurr has written a meaty review in today’s Spectator of Claire Harman’s experiment in biography All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything. Anyone who writes … Continue reading →