George Calderon c.1901
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon, 1912
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Captain of the 11
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.Recent Comments
- Patrick Miles on Source? Dear Katy, it's lovely to hear from you again! I hope you are well down there in Kent. Would you believe it, I too typed in that first line, as I thought it was perhaps the... (May 12, 2025 at 11:45 am)
- Roger Pulvers on Source? Ah, it is simply a тайна ремесла. But, I assure you, I did not use AI. Please give the book to someone who has not read it and is in your neighbourhood. (May 12, 2025 at 9:57 am)
- Katy George on Source? Pipped to the post! I typed in the first line line of the 2nd paragraph and it came up straight away to the source on Faded Page. (May 12, 2025 at 9:56 am)
- Patrick Miles on Source? Roger, you're a genius! (As if I didn't know.) Did you simply recognise it from your reading, as it were, or did you use AI? We used the most sophisticated search engines... (May 12, 2025 at 9:46 am)
- Roger Pulvers on Source? Unpopular Opinions by Dorothy L Sayers, that's the source of the quote. (May 12, 2025 at 7:24 am)
Author Archives: Patrick Miles
The Castle…of Oz?
Followers may remember that last year I also worked on a book with mathematical physicist-theologian John Polkinghorne, derived from a year’s conversations we had about his views on eschatology (i.e. nothing less than the life and death of humans, animals … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged armed forces, Botcham's Beardificator, bureaucracy, Cambridge City Council, computers, copyright, Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, databases, email, eschatology, EU Directive on Term of Copyright, Fogeyism, Franz Kafka, John Polkinghorne, Occam', Occam's Razor, programmers, publishers, Publishers at Large, self-publishing, sociopaths, submissions, The Castle, The Net, The Wizard of Oz, totalitarianism, websites, Yellow Brick Road
3 Comments
Has one become a Fogey?
In 1985, when Sam&Sam needed an ISBN number for N.A. Berdiaev, Aforizmy, I rang up the then registration agency and they sent me a form by post. I filled the form in (by hand, of course) and sent it back to … Continue reading
Sam&Sam publishers — a brief history
George Calderon: Edwardian Genius will be published under the imprint Sam&Sam. ‘What?’ you ask. ‘What on earth’s that?’ Quite. It was deliberately concocted to give nothing away, because it originated in Russia in the period of samizdat. Having been a dissident … Continue reading
Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Alexander Pushkin, Camizdat, carbons, comments, Duma, Georgii Fedotov, Joseph Brodsky, Joseph Stalin, KGB, Maia, Martis, mice, Nikolai Berdiaev, perestroika, publishing, Sam&Sam, samizdat, Samuel Goathead, sonnets, Sophie Koulomzin, typewriters, Vladimir Lenin, William Shakespeare
6 Comments
I accept the white feather
I am hoping to attend the ceremony at Ors on 4 November this year to commemorate the death of Wilfred Owen a hundred years ago (see Damian Grant’s post of 4 November 2016), and thought we might go on from … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged A Group Photograph, Alexis de Gunzberg, Andrew Tatham, Armistice, Auschwitz, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, Clare Hopkins, Colonel Gordon Wilson, commemoration, comments, Damian Grant, George Calderon, Helles, Journey's End, Last Post, Menin Gate, Ors, R.C. Sheriff, Royal Horse Guards, Sanctuary Wood, The Blues, The Great War, Thiepval, Thiepval Memorial, Verdun, white feather, Wilfred Owen, World War I, Ypres, Zillebeke
3 Comments
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
Progress
It is now a month since I fired the starting-pistol for publishing George Calderon: Edwardian Genius myself on 4 June 2018. Every writer I know assured me we could bring the book out in six months…but what they didn’t tell me … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged biographies, comments, design, fonts, format, George Calderon, Ian Strathcarron, illustrations, indexes, ISBN numbers, layout, printers, publishing, self-publishing, typesetting, walls of words
5 Comments
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
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged Acton Reynald, Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Anton Chekhov, Basil de Sélincourt, biography, Bruce Richmond, Chipping Norton, comments, Far End, Foxwold, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Goncourt Brothers, Hugh Walpole, Ivan Turgenev, Kingham, Kittie Calderon, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Laurence Binyon, Petersfield, Sir Edward Grey, The Encounter, The Great War, Victoria Cholmondeley, World War I, Ypres
1 Comment
Attempting to not-bore for England about limericks
I must apologise to all subscribers for their having received notification last week of a blog post that had no text in it! This was the result of human error, aka Aussie Flu. Unfortunately, when I did write the text … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Alfred Tennyson, biographies, biography, comments, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Lear, Evey Pym, Foxwold, Franz Kafka, George Calderon, Horatio Nelson, Jenny Uglow, John Pym, Joseph Brodsky, Karl Marx, Kittie Calderon, Lewis Carroll, limericks, Marie Curie, Rudyard Kipling, Russia, Violet Pym, Wadham College
3 Comments
So what IS biography?
I began the pre-typesetting read of my book — all 183,000 words of it — a fortnight ago, and immediately relived the never-ending malarkey with the Introduction… Even this late in the day I found myself tweaking the opening paragraph … Continue reading
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
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
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Arts and Crafts, biography, British Museum, Briton Rivière, Buckingham Mansions, Catherine Lubbock, Christmas, Clara Calderon, Clara Sumner, comments, dogs, Ethel Armstead, Frank Calderon, Frederic Lubbock, George Calderon, Hampstead, Heathland Lodge, Helen Binyon, Joan Calderon, Johnny Jones, Jones, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Binyon, Marguerite Calderon, Mary Hamilton, Philip Calderon, Tahiti, Vale of Health, vets, W.H. Gray
2 Comments
Own a commemorative masterpiece
I first wrote about the above book on 10 February 2016 . I suggest going now to http://www.groupphoto.co.uk/the-book for Andrew Tatham’s own description of it and how it came about. As you will see, it has been praised to the skies by communicators … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged 8th Battalion Royal Berkshire Regiment, A Group Photograph, Andrew Tatham, artworks, Battle of Loos, biographies, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, commemoration, comments, family histories, George Calderon, Gyles Brandreth, Jeremy Vine, Melvyn Bragg, Paul Cummins, poppies, Royal Berkshires, The Great War, Tom Piper, William Boyd, World War I
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Alan Coren touches root
Giles and Victoria Coren have done a magnificent job in selecting and presenting these 420 pages of their late father’s writings 1960-2007, very many of which are masterpieces. I hope they will not mind me invoking paragraph 8.7, sub-section a(ii), … Continue reading
Aleksei Remizov: the Imp has landed!
On 23 April 1914 Bertram Christian, of the publishers James Nisbet & Co. Ltd, wrote to George Calderon suggesting that he produce for them a volume of stories by the Russian writer Aleksei Remizov (1877-1957). There had been a glowing … Continue reading →