A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Captain of the 11
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George Calderon, 1912
George Calderon c.1901
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016Recent 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: Personal commentary
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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Goathead is launched
Dear Subscribers to Calderonia, The Anglo-Russian publisher Sam&Sam, which was founded in Moscow in 1974 and published George Calderon: Edwardian Genius in Britain in 2018, has now been divided into Sam&Sam owned and based exclusively in Russia, and The Goathead Press … Continue reading
Announcing: THE GOATHEAD PRESS
On 16 June this year the website www.samandsam.co.uk, which had existed since 2018, disappeared from the Web. Here is a reminder of what the splash page looked like: I refused to waste much time over who had perpetrated this, because … Continue reading
Joseph Brodsky: ‘October madrigal’
No stuffed gull on our mantelpiece but a darling quail. Grandfather ticking at his pace soothes each evening our battered drums. Outside, the tree is a candle with the glums. Four days now sea has pounded on its wall. Lay … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged blondes, eardrums, grandfather clocks, Joseph Brodsky, needles, October madrigal, poetry in translation, quail, Russian poetry, sea, sea walls, seagulls, sewing, tanka, translation
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Joseph Brodsky: ‘I put my arms…’
I put my arms around these shoulders, glanced at what lay behind her back, and saw a displaced chair that faded into the brightness of the wall. The light bulb’s filament was too intense for furniture so ripe, which meant … Continue reading
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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Source?
Can anyone identify the text below? If so, please leave the answer in a Comment, explaining how you arrived at it! A free copy of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius or Anton Chekhov: A Short Life will be yours if you … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged anger management, Anton Chekhov, Celts, comments, confrontation, English, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, George Orwell, insults, interpersonal relations, literary executors, literary sources, manners, marital problems, national character, patience, Peter Squire, rudeness, Scots, stress, The Establishment, translation
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Guest Post by John Pym: A Soviet film of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’
Nineteen-sixty – with the first movies of the French ‘New Wave’ about to burst upon the cinemagoing world – proved a golden year for the Cannes film festival. The jury included the leading Russian director Grigori Kozintsev and the iconoclastic … Continue reading
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Tagged Ala Chostakova, Aleksey Batalov, Andrei Moskvin, Anna Sergeyevna, Anton Chekhov, Ben-Hur, black and white films, Cannes Film Fetsival, colourisation, comments, Dmitri Gurov, dogs, expressionism, George Calderon, Georges Simenon, Grigori Kozintsev, Harvey Pitcher, Henry Miller, Iosif Kheifits, Iya Savvina, John Pym, Josef Heifitz, Joseph Stalin, Kittie Calderon, Klimbim Colour, La Dolce Vita, Lady with a Little Dog, Lenfilm, naturalism, New Wave, Pomeranian dogs, Robert Vas, Soviet films, symbolism, The Lady with the Little Dog, Yalta
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From the diary of a writer-publisher: 31
20 December 2024 Yet another pair of new M&S cords on which the button hole in the fly flap is too small for the button it is meant to go over! What has gone wrong at M&S about this? Have … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary
Tagged ageing, Anton Chekhov, Archbishop of Canterbury, birds, Bishop of Newcastle, Bishop of York, Charles Moore, child abuse, Church of England, comments, ethics, evangelical movement, fly flaps, forgiveness, glossolalia, Harvey Pitcher, Jesus Christ, John Polkinghorne, Justin Welby, Lady with a Little Dog, Marks & Spencer, mistletoe, morality, paedophilia, pike, pike fishing, Police, prayer in tongues, proactivity, propensity to act, repentance, safeguarding, sexual abuse, Ted Hughes, the pandemic, translation, trousers, wildlife
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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 →