Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Captain of the 11
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George Calderon, 1912
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George Calderon c.1901
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
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)Recent Comments
- Patrick Miles on The diary of a writer-publisher: 36 Wonderful, Andrew! Thank you very much. I will borrow that title, if you don't object... I hope you will allow Calderonia to feature your own next magnum opus after the Great... (February 28, 2026 at 8:18 am)
- Andrew Tatham on The diary of a writer-publisher: 36 A brilliantly evocative and thought-provoking medley of observations that would not be out of place in 'The collected life of a flat-cap penguin' (your words, only slightly... (February 27, 2026 at 9:48 am)
- John Pym on The essential Oxford novel Horace Hare’s acid and immensely readable Oxford Confessions deserve to sell even more pleasingly than Yale classicist Erich Segal’s Harvard/Radcliffe smash-hit weepie, Love... (January 29, 2026 at 2:39 pm)
- Graeme Wright on The essential Oxford novel If I may be so bold I'll throw into the Oxford quad Javier Marias's novel, All Souls. Here's a taste, courtesy of Penguin and Amazon: "At High Table in an Oxford College, the... (January 28, 2026 at 12:11 pm)
- Theo on Goathead is launched Dear Patrick, I wish you and Jim well in this new venture! Theo (November 11, 2025 at 2:00 pm)
Category Archives: Heroism and Adventure
Joseph Brodsky: A Christmas poem
They didn’t care about the desert that lay all around, or the blizzard that wrapped them in ghoulish sounds, or how cramped it was in a shepherd’s hut; that from all other spaces the world pushed them out. For, firstly, … Continue reading
Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged blizzard, Christmas poems, desert, Giotto di Bondone, Jesus Christ, Joseph Brodsky, poetry, refugees, Russian poetry, Space, St Joseph, Star of Bethlehem, stars, The Child, The Flight into Egypt, The Nativity, The Virgin Mary, verse translation
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The diary of a writer-publisher: 35
13 October 2025 There were a number of letters in The Times earlier this month describing butterflies that the authors had witnessed turning up at funerals and even settling on the coffin. The point was that people found it mysterious and strangely … Continue reading
Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged affectionate forms, Amazon, animism, Anton Chekhov, Badenweiler, butterflies, Coalition of the Willing, defeatism, diminutive forms, Donald Trump, economic sanctions, EU, funerals, John Polkinghorne, Joseph Brodsky, moths, Ol'ga Knipper, peace process, publication dates, quails, Roger Boyes, Russia, Rustem Umerov, seagulls, second presence, Steve Witkoff, The Goathead Press, The Seagull, The Times, The White Bow/Ghoune, translation, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Washington, What Can We Hope For?
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The diary of a writer-publisher: 34
27 June ‘Why aren’t arts leaders banging the drum for Ukraine any more?’ asks Richard Morrison in the arts column of today’s Times. He recently heard that when a ‘distinguished American performer’ wanted to light the stage at his festival performance … Continue reading
Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged 'I embraced these shoulders...', bathos, butterflies, butterfly conservation, cyber warfare, D.H. Lawrence, flags, George Orwell, Heath Fritillary, invasion of Ukraine, Joseph Brodsky, Katherine Mansfield, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Large Blue, Lulworth Skipper, Marina Basmanova, pants, Penguin Archive, Penguin Books, poetry in translation, publicity, Purple Emperor, Richard Morrison, Sam&Sam, samizdat, Samuel Goathead, Sand Lizard, Silver-Studded Blue, Small Tortoiseshell, Song in October, The Web, Ukraine, underclothes, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Putin, Women in Love
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My bond with Bond
On receiving for this year’s birthday James Bond’s Birds of the West Indies, I decided to read an Ian Fleming Bond novel for the first time in sixty years. It turned out that my 1962 copy of Dr No is the … Continue reading
Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged Alfred Blacking, Alligator, Basildon Bond, birds, Christopher Cerf, comments, consumerism, Crab Key, Crane Fly Island, Dr No, Evelyn Waugh, F.R. Leavis, fetishism, film adaptations, films, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, James Bond, Michael K. Frith, nudity, parodies, pornography, Royal St George's Golf Course, sadism, school magazines, sex, That Was the Week That Was, Ursula Andress
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The diary of a writer-publisher: 33
15 March 2025 To my blank incredulity, I have won my second literary prize in sixty-six years! I took out a subscription last August to the excellent Time Haiku, submitted a couple with no great hopes even of acceptance, and … Continue reading
Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged Alexander Pushkin, allotments, Baltic States, Boris Godunov, Brest, butterfly conservation, cats, comments, compost heaps, Donald Trump, Germany, haiku, Ian Fleming, Jamaica, James Bond, literary prizes, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, naivety, Nina Sadur, ornithology, Poland, rates of payment, reprints, Russian literature, Sam Sloan, Sam2, Small Tortoiseshell, stinging nettles, Time Haiku, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, West Indies, Zuwalki Gap
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50 years of ‘small publishing’: what has it taught me?
It has turned out that since Musk took over Twitter we cannot, after all, post our own Calderonia Tweets at the bottom of the Subscribe, Categories, Comments etc column on the right of the home page — though we can, … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged anniversaries, bibliographic rarities, biographies, books, editors, Elon Musk, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Nikolai Berdiaev, profit and loss, publishing, quality, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Sam&Sam, samizdat, selfie publishing, small publishers, Sofia Koulomzina, Twitter, Ukraine
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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
Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Uncategorized
Tagged 'real time', anniversaries, biographies, biography, Brexit, British Expeditionary Force, Calderonia, candles, commemoration, comments, empathy, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Isle of Wight, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Binyon, Pym family, The Great War, Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, World War I
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A second Family Bible
Laurence Brockliss, Emeritus Professor of History at Oxford University, is no stranger to Calderonia’s followers. For ten years he and his research team worked to create a relational database that crunched biographical information from online sites, archives, newspapers and other … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Andrew Tatham, Anthony Trollope, biographies, career mobility, Charles Dickens, Dennis Henry Wickham, digital history, Edwardianism, Edwardians, Family Bible, family histories, George Calderon, George Eliot, George Gissing, Harry Smith, Jane Austen, John Latham, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Brockliss, occupations, Oxbridge, professionals, professions, prosopographical studies, prosopography, public schools, relational databases, The Edwardian Era, The Great War, Thomas S. Boase, Victorians, women, World War I
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‘Immaturity’ and ‘youth’ in poetry
I was amused (for reasons about to emerge) that the first hit I had for my last post, ‘Quetzalcoatl’, came from Mexico…but I was astonished that no-one wrote in to ask why on earth the poem was called ‘Quetzalcoatl’ and … Continue reading
Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Alexander Pushkin, Aztecs, Communism, D.H. Lawrence, G.-J. Geitman, genocide, human sacrifice, immaturity, Imperial Lyceum, Joseph Stalin, Lyceum Poems, Mexico, Moscow, poetry, quetzal, Quetzalcoatl, rain, rainbows, Russia, Spanish Conquest, The Plumed Serpent, USSR, Wassily Kandinsky, youth
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From the diary of a writer-publisher: 29
5 April 2024 I have received from a cousin the above image of our grandfather’s regimental sword. This plate on its scabbard seems to supply some context to what I knew about his military career. He joined up in 1894 … Continue reading
Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged A Group Photograph, Alcaic metre, Andrew Tatham, anoraks, badges, British Expeditionary Force, brooches, Caitlin Pirie, Charles Miles, comments, Foreign Office, Friedrich Hölderlin, George Calderon, haikus, I Shall Not Be Away Long, Japan, Jim Miles, koi carp, military aid, NATO, Northamptonshire Regiment, paranoia, swords, The Clay Akita, The Great War, typos, Ukraine, verse translation, Vladimir Putin, World War I
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George Calderon: A complete new work surfaces
Garry Humphreys, author of a forthcoming book on Arthur Somervell (1863-1937), and I have now received from the archives of the Royal College of Music a link to the score of Somervell’s music for George’s ballet libretto The Blue Cloth (which … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged Arthur Somervell, ballet, ballet libretti, Ballets Russes, Garry Humphreys, George Calderon, Heathland Lodge, Kittie Calderon, manuscripts, Martin Shaw, Michel Fokine, Moscow Art Theatre, Moscow Arts, musical score, Royal College of Music, stagecraft, The Blue Cloth, The Brave Little Tailor, The Great War, The Red Cloth, Well Walk, William Caine, World War I, Ypres
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The essential Oxford novel
As Calderonians know, there were two wildly popular novels about Oxford University in the nineteenth century: Cuthbert Bede’s The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green (1853) and George’s The Adventures of Downy V. Green, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (1902). They have … Continue reading →