A happy new year to subscribers and viewers, and thank you sincerely for following us through our ninth year of existence. The question of Calderonia’s future is always in my mind, but I can assure you we shall continue at least to 2024, when the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies conference will next be in Cambridge and Sam&Sam MUST appear. After that, perhaps I should take an Elon Musk-style poll?
I entitled my New Year post last year ‘A Year of Promise’. That may now seem to have been ill-advised. In fact I was referring to the prospect of the pandemic ending in 2022 and Sam&Sam making their first public appearance in the U.K. — as a stall at the Cambridge BASEES Conference — which would have sold quite a few books. I was convinced in December 2021 that Russia was going to invade Ukraine, and thought that on the Soviet precedent they would do it over Christmas. Before 24 February I believed Russia’s aim was to pin down the Ukrainian army north of Kyiv, invade from the east, and stop at the Dnepro River, partitioning the country. I never expected it to become a total war about liberty and democracy that affects every one of us and, inevitably, led to the cancellation of the Cambridge conference in protest.
You may feel I am equally ill-advised to call this post one of hope. The amazing Ukrainians have retaken this year almost half of the 25% of their country that Russia seized, but driving the Russians out of the rest will be hell. Meanwhile, Russia is inexorably destroying Ukraine’s infrastructure, and there is every sign that Putin is planning another direct assault on Kyiv. The unity of western nations is formidable. Who would have expected Justin Welby, on a visit to Ukraine, to say that Boris Johnson was ‘stunningly right’ in his response to the invasion? Who would have expected Johnson to pay fulsome tribute to the EU for its support of Ukraine? Personally, I don’t think Joe Biden has put a foot wrong on the issue. Yet the West could run perilously low on ammunition and money.
Nevertheless, we must make this a year of hope. Not the kind as in ‘I hope for an award’, meaning ‘I’m in with a chance and it would be nice if I got one’, but an ‘absurd’ hope, the hope that begins the other side of despair (at what happened in Bucha, for instance). This is the hope that never falters in desiring something, willing something, believing it must happen. A hope that never, never surrenders. This hope comes very close indeed to courage. And you will certainly find that hope and courage here:
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
Captain of the 11
George Calderon c.1901
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
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)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
George Calderon, 1912
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
A year of hope
A happy new year to subscribers and viewers, and thank you sincerely for following us through our ninth year of existence. The question of Calderonia’s future is always in my mind, but I can assure you we shall continue at least to 2024, when the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies conference will next be in Cambridge and Sam&Sam MUST appear. After that, perhaps I should take an Elon Musk-style poll?
I entitled my New Year post last year ‘A Year of Promise’. That may now seem to have been ill-advised. In fact I was referring to the prospect of the pandemic ending in 2022 and Sam&Sam making their first public appearance in the U.K. — as a stall at the Cambridge BASEES Conference — which would have sold quite a few books. I was convinced in December 2021 that Russia was going to invade Ukraine, and thought that on the Soviet precedent they would do it over Christmas. Before 24 February I believed Russia’s aim was to pin down the Ukrainian army north of Kyiv, invade from the east, and stop at the Dnepro River, partitioning the country. I never expected it to become a total war about liberty and democracy that affects every one of us and, inevitably, led to the cancellation of the Cambridge conference in protest.
You may feel I am equally ill-advised to call this post one of hope. The amazing Ukrainians have retaken this year almost half of the 25% of their country that Russia seized, but driving the Russians out of the rest will be hell. Meanwhile, Russia is inexorably destroying Ukraine’s infrastructure, and there is every sign that Putin is planning another direct assault on Kyiv. The unity of western nations is formidable. Who would have expected Justin Welby, on a visit to Ukraine, to say that Boris Johnson was ‘stunningly right’ in his response to the invasion? Who would have expected Johnson to pay fulsome tribute to the EU for its support of Ukraine? Personally, I don’t think Joe Biden has put a foot wrong on the issue. Yet the West could run perilously low on ammunition and money.
Nevertheless, we must make this a year of hope. Not the kind as in ‘I hope for an award’, meaning ‘I’m in with a chance and it would be nice if I got one’, but an ‘absurd’ hope, the hope that begins the other side of despair (at what happened in Bucha, for instance). This is the hope that never falters in desiring something, willing something, believing it must happen. A hope that never, never surrenders. This hope comes very close indeed to courage. And you will certainly find that hope and courage here:
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
ADVERTISEMENT
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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