Tag Archives: The Times

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 30

Posted on September 23, 2024 by Patrick Miles

15 August 2024 I have seriously to consider binning Twitter (‘X’). I recently started receiving Tweets from Elon Musk, which I either skimmed or did not read at all. This was a mistake, because the bots decided that my ‘tolerance’ … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged 'The Retiral', cats, cigars, concrete, D.H. Lawrence, Elon Musk, euphemisms, free speech, haikus, Katherine Mansfield, locks, Lucy Caldwell, men writers, Newcastle upon Tyne, Penelope Lively, Rupert Murdoch, sheds, short stories, Tessa Hadley, The Times, trains, Twitter, Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, women writers, York | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 21

Posted on February 6, 2023 by Patrick Miles

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 →

Posted in Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged Alexander Vampilov, Anton Chekhov, armaments, baseline studies, biodiversity, biographies, biography, birds, Bottengoms Fram, butterflies, Calderonia, Cambridge, Cambridge City Council, Cambridge Theatre Company, Church of England, Church Times, Claire Harman, claustrophobia, Clays of Bungay, comments, conservation, cyber warfare, death, ecosystems, entrapment, Erich Ludendorff, Francis Kilvert, funerals, General Douglas Haig, General Foch, ghosts, hackers, Henry Vaughan, Ice Cold in Alex, James Miles, John Constable, Katherine Mansfield, last, Last Summer in Chulimsk, Next to Nature, paranoia, Peter Hall, Ronald Blythe, Russia, Ruth Scurr, Sam&Sam, security certificates, servers, short stories, Siberia, Spring Offensive 1918, Suffolk, Sylvia Syms, T.S. Eliot, The Great War, The Spectator, The Times, The Web, Tree Belt, Ukraine, Victim, wildlife, wildlife corridors, wildlife havens, World War I | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 20

Posted on January 9, 2023 by Patrick Miles

16 December 2022 The Times has a long piece today entitled ‘Putin’s absence fuels rumours of Noah’s Ark plot’. It reports Putin cancelling his annual ice hockey match on Red Square, his annual press conference, and his annual ‘conversation with … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged 20 July 1944 Plot, Adolf Hitler, Alexander II, Argentina, Christmas, Crimea, Crimean War, Donetsk, Erwin Rommel, Field Marshal Rommel, iconography, James Miles, Japan, Jim Miles, John Polkinghorne, Joseph Brodsky, Luhansk, Nativity, Nicholas I, Noah's Ark Plot, Odessa, Paul Dirac, professors, Russian Army, Russian language, Russian poetry, Sam1, Sam2, Seamus Heaney, The Quantum World, The Times, translation, translations, Ukraine, Venezuela, verse translation, Vladimir Putin, What Can We Hope For? | Leave a comment

A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 3

Posted on April 23, 2022 by Patrick Miles

11 April 2022 Whilst coming back from the shop with today’s newspaper, I could see a neighbour on the other side of the street who was born at the gates of Mauthausen concentration camp six days before it was liberated … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 'The Steppe', Anton Chekhov, appeasement, Bellingcat, Bletchley, Cambridge, Crimea, Czechoslovakia, Dnipro, Donbas, Donetsk, FSB, KGB, Mauthausen, Max Hastings, morale, NATO, Nazi Germany, Polonia, Russia, Sergei Beseda, Simferopol, steppeland, tank battles, The Times, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky, Yalta, Yasinovataya, Zhdanov | 4 Comments

A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 2

Posted on April 11, 2022 by Patrick Miles

5 April 2022 When I contemplated the image from Kyiv that I posted last week, as well as Bruegel I thought of Isaac Babel’s stories Red Cavalry about the Russo-Polish War of 1919-21. Some of that war took place in … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged 'The Prince', Aleksandr Lukashenko, Andrew Tatham, Anton Chekhov, atrocities, Babi Yar, Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre, Belarus, Belorussia, Bucha, Chris Deverell, comments, Crimea, David McDuff, Donald Trump, Donbas, EU, Fiona Hill, Georg Trakl, Isaac Babel, Joe Biden, Kyiv, L'viv, Mariupol, Military Intelligence, NATO, Nazis, Niccolo Machiavelli, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Red Cavalry, The Times, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, weapons, World War I, Zbrucz | Leave a comment

A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 1

Posted on April 4, 2022 by Patrick Miles

16 March 2022 Tony Blair has said that to keep telling Putin all the things we won’t do in the face of Putin’s carnage (e.g. enforce a no-fly zone, give Ukraine Polish MiGs, co-occupy and safeguard Western Ukraine with the … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Alexander Litvinenko, Alexei Navalny, Anna Politkovskaya, Belgium, comments, fear, Iuliia Skripal, Joe Biden, Kaiser Wilhelm II, MiG fighters, peace negotiations, Pityriasis rosea, Roman Abramovich, Sergei Skripal, The Times, Tony Blair, Treaty of London, Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky, World War I | Leave a comment

John Baines: exemplar of a young officer

Posted on October 19, 2020 by Patrick Miles

‘Exemplar’, not ‘exemplary’, because John Stanhope Baines, son of the Herbert Stanhope Baines who features in Laurence Brockliss’s recent guest post, would not have wanted anyone to regard him as an exemplary young officer of World War I. When he … Continue reading →

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Andrew Baines, Armistice, Austro-Hungary, Baines dynasty, Belgium, British Expeditionary Force, Bulgaria, Dearest Mother, Elisabeth Wicksteed, Elizabeth Baines, Erich Ludendorff, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Germany, Greece, Helion, Herbert Stanhope Baines, Honor Baines, Joanna Palmer, John Baines, Laurence Brockliss, Macedonia, Raphael Kirchner, roadmaking, Royal Engineers, Salonika, Sappers, The Great War, The Leeds Mercury, The Times, Turkey, Winchester College, Windsor Spring Festival, World War I, Ypres | Leave a comment

Health Warning

Posted on June 15, 2020 by Patrick Miles

I have decided I must go public about the nine years of frustration that the owner of the Calderon Papers and I endured as we tried to find a permanent home for them in a British archival institution. It was … Continue reading →

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Thunderer', archival management, archive donations, archive sales, archives, biography, British archives, Calderon Family Papers, Cambridge, cataloguing, comments, communication, conservation, customer care, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Harvard University, Kittie Calderon, The Spectator, The Times | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 8

Posted on March 17, 2020 by Patrick Miles

13 March Within seven hours of my last post going up, the organisers of the 2020 conference of the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) emailed everyone to say they were calling it off. Only an hour … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, Archie Brown, BASEES, BASEES Conference, Black Crow, coronavirus, COVID-19, democracy, Edmund Burke, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Matthew Paris, Middlemarch, Mikhail Gorbachev, newspapers, parliamentarianism, philosophy, quarantine, Rodric Braithwaite, Sam&Sam, self-isolation, Sergei Esenin, The Spectator, The Times | 2 Comments

Interlude on a familiar theme

Posted on June 28, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Clays have pleasantly surprised me by discovering that they have over-printed by not 20 copies, which is the number under/over contractually allowed, but 59 — which they offer me at an extraordinarily good price including free delivery. I have snapped … Continue reading →

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged 14-18 NOW, Arts Council, biographies, biography, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, Brexit, British Expeditionary Force, commemoration, comments, Dalby Forest, Danny Boyle, Die Zeit, Europe, Fly By Night, George Calderon, Kenneth Bogle, Millicent Fawcett, official art, Paul Cummins, personal connection, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Morrison, Shrouds of the Somme, taxpayers, The Cenotaph, the government, The Great War, The Times, Tom Piper, Wilfred Owen, William Orpen, World War I | 5 Comments

George Calderon and the gender pay gap

Posted on April 17, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Obviously I believe George Calderon’s life is interesting in itself — dramatic, even — but another reason I have written his biography is that many of the issues of the day that he responded to are still with us (e.g. … Continue reading →

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, comments, economics, feminism, gender difference, gender pay gap, George Calderon, James Boswell, market economies, market forces, market value, Men's League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, Millicent Fawcett, National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, Octavia Hill, political economy, Samuel Johnson, suffragism, suffragists, The Guardian, The Times, Woman in Relation to the State, women's wages | 8 Comments

Brexit: a modest theory

Posted on November 19, 2017 by Patrick Miles

The Times digest of events in the Great War and Mike Schuster’s Great War Project continue to come down the wires once a week, together with scores of daily Tweets from the Imperial War Museum, from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, from … Continue reading →

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Battle of Mons, Battle of Passchendaele, Battle of the Somme, Belgium, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, Brexit, British Expeditionary Force, commemoration, comments, EU Referendum, Europe, Mike Schuster, Paul Cummins, The Great War, The Times, Tom Piper, Winston Churchill, World War I | 3 Comments

Plum pie in the sky

Posted on July 14, 2017 by Patrick Miles

I was intending to post about this subject in February, but my attention wandered and the relevant newspaper cuttings got buried. I am very glad that I put it off, as I have now read this recently reprinted book, which … Continue reading →

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Plum', A.A. Milne, Adolf Hitler, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Ransome, Asperger Syndrome, autism, Bertie Wooster, Blandings, Bolsheviks, Charlotte Bronte, comments, D.H. Lawrence, E.H. Carr, empathy, Evelyn Waugh, Evgenii Zamiatin, Ezra Pound, Gabriel Yegorov, George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Stalin, Lenin, Marcel Proust, Nazis, Norman Stone, psychology, psychopathy, R.L. Stevenson, Simon Baron-Cohen, The Great War, The Times, Utopia, V.I. Lenin, W.H. Auden, World War 2, World War I | 6 Comments

The War

Posted on February 22, 2017 by Patrick Miles

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 →

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Belgium, Brexit, commemoration, comments, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Dardanelles, David Reynolds, Gallipoli, General Kitchener, Georg Trakl, George Calderon, Imperial War Museum, Kittie Calderon, Lloyd George, Norman Stone, Paul Nash, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, The Great War, The Times, Theobald Bethmann Hollweg, Third Battle of Krithia, Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Turnip Winter, Wilfred Owen, William Rothenstein, Woodrow Wilson, World War I, Ypres | Leave a comment

A letter to the ‘Manchester Guardian’, 12 May 1919

Posted on November 18, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Sir, — The recent notice in the “Times” of George Calderon’s death in battle on Gallipoli tells his friends that they may hope no longer. To us the loss is inexpressible. That which the theatre has suffered cannot, of course, … Continue reading →

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Annie Horniman, comments, Dardanelles, Gaiety Theatre Manchester, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Manchester Guardian, Manchester Repertory Company, military interpreters, obituaries, Percy Lubbock, Royal Horse Guards, The Blues, The Great War, The Times, Third Battle of Krithia, William Caine, World War I, Ypres | Leave a comment

The Press tries to help

Posted on July 16, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Now that George was officially ‘missing’, Kittie could draw on George’s and her contacts in the world of print to publicise the fact and appeal nationwide for any information about him. She was extremely energetic about this. She first wrote … Continue reading →