Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Captain of the 11
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
George Calderon, 1912
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
George Calderon c.1901
Recent Comments
- Patrick Miles on Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ Many, many thanks for reprising, Johnnie, for I know how busy you are. How serendipitous that you had just seen a 'live' performance of Murnau's b&w Sunrise! I gather from... (March 14, 2025 at 10:21 am)
- John Pym on Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ March 8, 2025: Last evening, I watched a digital transfer of a black-and-white movie, made by an expatriate German in California nearly a hundred years ago, in a packed town... (March 10, 2025 at 4:36 pm)
- Patrick Miles on Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ Your response here is (obviously) deeply informed... Thank you very much indeed. In comparing the coach ride to Simferopol in Heifitz's film with the chariot race in Ben-Hur... (March 5, 2025 at 10:01 am)
- John Pym on Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ Black-and-white camerawork was, I suspect, as natural to the director of The Lady with the Little Dog as breathing in and out or eating his breakfast. I doubt that he was... (February 28, 2025 at 11:01 pm)
- Patrick Miles on Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ We are deeply favoured and honoured to publish on Calderonia the eminent film critic John Pym's magnificent tribute to Heifitz's film The Lady with the Little Dog, perfectly... (February 24, 2025 at 10:56 am)
Author Archives: Patrick Miles
A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 1
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
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Bruegel, reality and truth
We all, I imagine, have photographs of terrible events (World War 1, say, the Holocaust, or Hiroshima) indelibly seared on our brains. Where Ukraine 2022 is concerned, the above is the one I shall never forget. The face is straight … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged comments, death, Four Quartets, grief, Hiroshima, Kiev, love, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, reality, Russia, T.S. Eliot, The Holocaust, truth, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, World War I
2 Comments
Only one subject…
For the West, the most shameful part of the Ukrainian War is that if we had stood by the assurances of security that we gave Ukraine in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 after negotiating the transfer of its nuclear arsenal to … Continue reading
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Tagged Adolf Hitler, Afghan War, Aleksandr Lukashenko, Belorussia, Brest, Budapest Memorandum, Crimean War, Donbas, International Court of Justice, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Kaliningrad, Luhansk, Mariupol, NATO, Nikita Khrushchev, paranoia, Russia, Russo-Japanese War, Stalin, Sudetenland, The Crimea, threats, Ukraine, Ukrainian SSR, Vladimir Putin, Volodomyr Zelensky, vranë, war criminals
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Cambridge Tales 4: ‘Sleep and Death’
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Tagged 'Sleep and Death', À la recherche du temps perdu, Aligoté, Apollo, Cambridge Tales, cats, Chablis, college life, Dante, death, Don Quixote, Frances Cornford, J.S. Bach, Marcel Proust, May Week, Meursault, paradise, Pimms, Plato, Professor of French, Professor of Italian, Professor of Spanish, professors, Rupert Brooke, Sancho Panza, wine
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Cambridge Tales 2: ‘His Letter’
He had had the honour of presiding at dessert, where he always drank the accepted minimum. He had entertained some of the guests with his account of the council estate on which he had grown up, and his bedder’s perennial … Continue reading
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Tagged 'His Letter', Alan Cook, Cambridge Tales, college life, college servants, guest hours, sex, short story, students, The Fellowship, The Master, undergraduates
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Cambridge Tales 1: ‘Ghoune’
It was a dark, diluvial, owl-infested night. Despite the glass of Aquavit that he had downed at two in the morning after filling out, checking and re-checking his mark sheets, he tossed and turned in his bed. There was nothing … Continue reading
A year of promise
A very happy new year to all Calderonia’s subscribers and viewers! Thank you for staying with us through 2021, which was our eighth calendar year, and I can promise you at least another year of posts from me and my … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov: A Short Life, BASEES, biographies, British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, Calderonia, comments, COVID-19, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Gleb Yakunin, Jim Miles, pandemics, promises, Robinson College, Sam&Sam, Sergei Bychkov, Spanish Flu, The Great War, World War I
2 Comments
Sensei Pulvers’ miraculous year
A friend of Jim’s in Japan brought Roger Pulvers and me together three years ago. The friend referred to Pulvers in the most natural way as ‘Sensei Pulvers’. And this is totally appropriate. Anyone whose children have attended karate classes … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged annus mirabilis, entanglement, EPR Effect, fly swats, George Calderon, haiku, If There Were No Japan, Japan, Japanese poetry, John Polkinghorne, Masaoka Shiki, Miyazawa Kenji, My Japan: A Cultural Memoir, Night on the Milky Way Train, Poems 2020, poetry in translation, Polish poetry, polymaths, quantum physics, Roger Pulvers, Russian poetry, sensei, Sergei Esenin, snails, The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn, The Unmaking of an American, Wholly Esenin
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‘These magnificent metal beasts’
Sam2 gave me this book last Christmas and it’s been a source of endless delight ever since. At 8.5 x 12.0 inches and beautifully produced, it may seem like a coffee table book, but it is much more. I have … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged aesthetics, balance, cigarettes, cold drinks, comments, design, hot drinks, Japan, Japanese art, Japanese poetry, Japanese technology, machines, photographs, Sam2, semiotics, souvenirs, T-shirts, Tim Easley, Tokyo, vending machines
3 Comments
Guest post by Alison Miles: Some geographical aspects of a visit to Japan in 2013
I visited Japan in autumn 2013 and my main reason was to see Jim, who lived there for several years. It was about six months after I retired so a wonderful opportunity to take a long-haul flight (my first ever) … Continue reading
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Tagged Alison Miles, Asakusa, bullet train, Burgess Model, cities, earthquake management, earthquakes, geography, Gion, Hakone, Hoyt Model, Japan, Kaetsu Educational and Cultural Centre, Kyoto, Lake Ashi, Mount Fuji, Nara, Okumura Corporation Commemorative Museum, Owakudani Valley, Pacific Ring of Fire, seismicity, Shinkansen, Tohoku earthquake, Tokyo, tourism, town planning, Toyohashi, trains, urban models, urban structures, volcanicity, volcanoes
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‘Deep North’…and far out?
This was only the second ‘Japanese’ book that I ever read after The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, and of course there was a connection: I won’t say that Bashō (1644-94) is my favourite Japanese haiku-writer, but he’s surely the … Continue reading
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Tagged Bashō, boundary situations, civilisations, classic, collaboration, comments, dialogue, disciples, ethics, fatalism, George Calderon, haiku, hokka, Japan, Japanese literature, journeys, morality, Narrow Road to the Far North, Nobuyuki Yuasa, Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, Penguin Classics, Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton, resignation, Roger Pulvers, shrines, sociability, symbols, Tahiti, taigan no kaji, travelogues, world classics, Zen Buddhism
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A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 2
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 →