Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Captain of the 11
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
George Calderon, 1912
George Calderon c.1901
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)Recent Comments
- Stuart Randall on 4 June 1915: The Third Battle of Krithia Thank you for your kind words, Patrick. On Wednesday morning, I reminded my three brothers that the 110th anniversary of the battle was upon us, and pointed them towards this... (June 7, 2025 at 9:07 pm)
- Patrick Miles on 4 June 1915: The Third Battle of Krithia Thank you for leaving this wonderful comment. I am so moved: you have brought the very spot almost unbearably close on this the 110th anniversary. Like George Calderon, your... (June 6, 2025 at 9:34 pm)
- Stuart Randall on 4 June 1915: The Third Battle of Krithia Thank you so much for putting this online. My great-uncle, Private William Pitt, served with the 4th Btn. Worcestershire Regiment. He was posthumously mentioned in despatches... (May 21, 2025 at 5:29 pm)
- Stephen Rust on Guest post by John Pym: Games Ancient and Modern A wonderful post. John, I've always adored your writings about Merchant Ivory and would love to chat more about them someday. I teach cinema at the University of Oregon,... (May 16, 2025 at 6:45 pm)
- 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)
Category Archives: Personal commentary
The biographer perspires
For a few days, I am almost entirely taken up with two smallish but extended projects that have nothing to do with my biography of George Calderon. This is highly frustrating. I tied up chapter 14, which ends with George … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged Ashford, biographies, biography, Brighton, comments, Donegal, Elizabeth Ellis, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Kittie Calderon, The Great War, World War I
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The return to Tahiti
Calderon arrived in London from Tahiti on 30 October 1906 and started writing his book about the island in November 1907. However, he soon gave it up to concentrate on his plays The Fountain and Cromwell: Mall o’Monks. Meanwhile, as Kittie put … Continue reading
‘Black Pot’ and black holes
For the first two years that I was writing George Calderon’s biography, its working title was Black Pot: The Mysterious Life of George Calderon. The reason for this was not just that several people before me had failed to find significantly … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Personal commentary
Tagged biographies, biography, Brothers Grimm, Charles Frohman, comments, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Kum Kale, Mabel Dearmer, Martin Shaw, Percy Lubbock, Peter Pan, Sedd el Bahr, Tahiti, The Brave Little Tailor, The Great War, The Lamp, William Caine, World War I
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Writers’ illnesses
Presumably George Calderon had recovered from the influenza that confined him to Fort Brockhurst for a fortnight; but if so, why did he come home on sick leave ‘still very ill and with a high temperature’, as Kittie described it? … Continue reading
The Edwardian turn of language
If George’s translations are ‘quirky’ and Constance’s ‘bland’, what is it they have in common that qualifies them both as ‘Edwardian’? A certain kind of logorrhoea combined with loose sentence structure and genteelism. Garnett, it has to be said, is … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, comments, Constance Garnett, George Calderon, Harold Pinter, Kittie Calderon, Michael Frayn, Michel St-Denis, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Theodore Komisarjevsky
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Mews, hues, and wonkers
So (see ‘Two anniversaries’, 29 January), save perhaps for a few lost manuscript versions of Chekhov’s one-act plays made throughout the British Empire for amateur performance, Constance Garnett was the first person to translate a Chekhov play into English (The … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, comments, Constance Garentt, Elizaveta Fen, George Calderon, Glasgow Repertory Theatre, John Galsworthy, John Russell Brown, Larus ridibundus, Laurence Senelick, Lydia Yavorskaya, Ronald Hingley, Royal National Theatre, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, The Stage Society
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The dear departed
After writing the last sentence of George’s life in its strict earthly sense (I have two short chapters about his and Kittie’s afterlife still to write), I left the manuscript chapter for a day before coming back to revise it, as … Continue reading
The Scott syndrome
Two days ago, I happened to hear on Radio 3 Sarah Walker’s introduction to her ‘Choice’ on Essential Classics, which was Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antartica (sic). As I recall it now, she said that the composer was commissioned to write the … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged 'real time', Battle of the Brickstacks, biographies, biography, comments, Constantinople, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Ian Hamilton, Kittie Calderon, Lieutenant-General Aylmer Hunter-Weston, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, Robert Falcon Scott, Sinfonia Antartica, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Vaughan Williams, World War I, Ypres
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A biographer sighs
I have now written the last chapter of Calderon’s life (not the last chapter of the book), and revised it in manuscript. I have been living with the whole Gallipoli campaign for the past three months. Although this has not … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged Alan Moorehead, biography, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Peter Hart, The Great War, World War I
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Lacunae: the ‘benefits’
So (see my post of 21 January) we do not know a great deal about George Calderon’s training at Fort Brockhurst between now and the middle of April 1915, nor about his relationship with Kittie in that period, because of … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, biography, comments, Dardanelles, George Calderon, Kittie Calderon, lacunae, The Great War, World War I
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They have wonderful editors
Hilary Mantel is an excellent writer. But when it was announced in January 2013 that Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were going to be adapted for the RSC and a media maelstrom broke out, I felt uneasy. It wasn’t as though Thomas … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell: Mall o'Monks, David Cameron, editors, George Calderon, George Osborne, Hilary Mantel, Lloyd George, Nick Clegg, Rachel Sylvester, RSC, The Times, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, Victor Hugo, Wolf Hall
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An Appeal
If you have not read Clare Hopkins’s ‘Recent Comment’ of 9 January, please do. Clare is Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford, and the author of what has been described to me by the Senior Tutor of a different Oxford foundation … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged Archie Ripley, Arthur Farquharson, biography, Cecil Sharp, Clare Hopkins, comments, Coote Hedley, George Calderon, Kittie Calderon, Martin Shaw, Reginald Tiddy, The Brave Little Tailor, The Great War, Trinity College Oxford, William Caine, World War I
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Phantom flies in amber
So George was preparing himself in earnest for his forthcoming medical. He mentions having ‘massages’. I have a clear recollection of reading somewhere that these were ‘electrical’ massages — presumably the latest thing — but I cannot for the life … Continue reading
A biographer in-spires
I have just read a long article by Ruth Scurr, ‘Lives, some briefer than others’, in last Saturday’s Guardian Review (28 February), which I thoroughly recommend to followers if they can get it, along with a piece by Stuart Kelly, ‘Enter … Continue reading →