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.
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
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
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
George Calderon c.1901
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Captain of the 11
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
George Calderon, 1912
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Recent Comments
- 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)
- Roger Pulvers on Source? Ah, it is simply a тайна ремесла. But, I assure you, I did not use AI. Please give the book to someone who has not read it and is in your neighbourhood. (May 12, 2025 at 9:57 am)
- Katy George on Source? Pipped to the post! I typed in the first line line of the 2nd paragraph and it came up straight away to the source on Faded Page. (May 12, 2025 at 9:56 am)
- Patrick Miles on Source? Roger, you're a genius! (As if I didn't know.) Did you simply recognise it from your reading, as it were, or did you use AI? We used the most sophisticated search engines... (May 12, 2025 at 9:46 am)
- Roger Pulvers on Source? Unpopular Opinions by Dorothy L Sayers, that's the source of the quote. (May 12, 2025 at 7:24 am)
Tag Archives: comments
Guest post: Clare Hopkins, ‘One Man and his College’
Anyone who has ever watched an episode of Morse or Lewis will know that Oxford Colleges are well supplied with portraits. Founders, archbishops, prime ministers, and Nobel Prize winners gaze grandly down from the panelled walls of Dining Halls. Smaller … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Archibald Ripley, Archie Ripley, Arnold Pienne, Arthur Lowry, athletics, biography, Clare Hopkins, commemoration, comments, Dardanelles, Downy V. Green, Eastcote, Frederick Hollyer, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Gryphon Club, Harold Dowdall, Henry Woods, Herbert Blakiston, Hugh Legge, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Binyon, Michael Furse, Miners Strike 1912, Percy Lubbock, Rugby, Smoking Concert, St Ives College, The Fountain, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Trinity College Oxford, Trinity College War Memorial, World War I
6 Comments
George’s alma maters
I little thought, when I visited the archives of Trinity College, Oxford, on 4 August 2011 to research aspects of George Calderon’s undergraduate years there, that five years later I would still be in invaluable contact with the Archivist, Clare … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged alma mater, biographies, biography, Calderonia, Clare Hopkins, comments, George Calderon, Kittie Calderon, L.W.B. Brockliss, One Man and his College, The Great War, Trinity College Oxford, University of Oxford, World War I
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‘He became his admirers…’
W.H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ describes Yeats’s death in January 1939, culminating in: ‘The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.’ I often think the word should be ‘readers’ rather than ‘admirers’, for as Auden himself … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged British Expeditionary Force, commemoration, comments, For the Fallen, George Calderon, Laurence Binyon, Remembrance Day, Rupert Brooke, The Great War, The Soldier, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, war memorials, World War I
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‘bubbling with wit and good humour’
In a letter to the TLS (9 July 2010) I appealed for unpublished letters or works of George Calderon, but also asked readers to contact me if they had ‘come across references to him in obscure publications’. My thinking was that … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged biographies, biography, comments, Dardanelles, Fort Brockhurst, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Grenadier Guards, Helen Peel, Heneage, Kittie Calderon, Michael Davidson, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, Robert Peel, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Times Literary Supplement, World War I
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Some ‘announcements’
I am staggered that my Introduction has passed its latest grilling, been tweaked yet again, and finalised as version 8. Deep down, though, I know I can’t write this sort of thing. To quote another favourite tag of Chekhovians, from Three … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, biographies, biography, Calderonia, Clare Hopkins, comments, George Calderon, Grant Richards, guest posts, Harvey Pitcher, Laurence Senelick, Three Sisters, Times Literary Supplement, Trinity College Oxford, William Lyon Phelps
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Holroyd on biography
Whenever I re-read my typescript, I check the sources for a few facts or assertions chosen at random. The last time I was re-reading, one of the assertions that struck me as needing checking was that Augustus John had been … Continue reading
One does the hokey cokey
I said in my post of 6 October (nearly two months ago!) that I was ‘fired up to put the last tittle on my biography by the end of November’, which meant in the first instance writing the Afterword (‘Who … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary, Uncategorized
Tagged 'real time', Afterword, biographies, biography, chronotopia, comments, eschatology, finishing, George Calderon, hokey cokey, Introduction, John Polkinghorne, Kittie Calderon, Len Goodman, writer's block
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‘The Long Shadow’, War Poetry, and Commemoration
Faithful followers of this blog will recall my account on 16 December 2015 of Professor David Reynolds’s public lecture ‘Making Peace with the Great War: Centenary Reflections’. I have now read the book behind the lecture (see above) and … Continue reading
Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Adrian Gregory, atrocities, Belgium, Brexit, British Expeditionary Force, commemoration, comments, concentration camps, Damian Grant, David Reynolds, EU, Forester's House, General French, General Kitchener, Isaac Rosenberg, La Maison Forestière, Pals battalions, propaganda, Siegfried Sassoon, The Great War, The Holocaust, The Long Shadow, Thiepval, Treaty of Versailles, War Poets, Wilfred Owen, Wilfred Owen Association (France), World War I, Ypres
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A letter to the ‘Manchester Guardian’, 12 May 1919
Sir, — The recent notice in the “Times” of George Calderon’s death in battle on Gallipoli tells his friends that they may hope no longer. To us the loss is inexpressible. That which the theatre has suffered cannot, of course, … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged Annie Horniman, comments, Dardanelles, Gaiety Theatre Manchester, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Manchester Guardian, Manchester Repertory Company, military interpreters, obituaries, Percy Lubbock, Royal Horse Guards, The Blues, The Great War, The Times, Third Battle of Krithia, William Caine, World War I, Ypres
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‘…you may touch them not.’
Over the last two years, I have been asked why I chose Wilfred Owen’s line ‘Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not’ as the epigraph to Calderonia; why I am apparently fond of the poem; whether I … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged agapē, camaraderie, comments, erotic love, Georg Trakl, George Calderon, Greater Love, Hölderlin, intimacy, Ivor Gurney, Jesus Christ, Laurence Binyon, Mary Magdalene, Platonic love, Santanu Das, The Great War, touch, war poetry, War Poets, Wilfred Owen, World War I
3 Comments
And the asp jumped over the chimney sweeper!
That time of year is approaching again…the time of public readings of verse four of Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’. I shall be listening carefully for who says ‘grow-not old’, who ‘grow not-old’, and who indeed ‘not grow old’ (see … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Andrew Marvell, aspen, chimney sweeper moth, comments, cows, Cymbeline, dandelions, Dulce et decor est, Experiment with a Hand Lens, For the Fallen, Henry Vaughan, Humpty Dumpty, John Donne, Joseph Brodsky, Laurence Binyon, Leningrad, Looking Back, metrical stress, Michael Alexander, nursery tales, R.F. Langley, Stratford-upon-Avon, syntax, The Apparition, To His Coy Mistress, Wilfred Owen, William Shakespeare
4 Comments
Guest post: Harvey Pitcher, ‘Calderon on Chekhov’
Some years have passed since I last took down my copy of Two Plays of Tchekhof: Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by George Calderon (1912). I remembered the book with affection, especially the introduction, but going back to old … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, appreciation, comments, communication, George Calderon, golf, Harvey Pitcher, literary criticism, meditation, soliloquy, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Three Sisters, Tom Stoppard, translation, Two Plays of Tchekhof, Uncle Vanya
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The limits of biography
I do not know why the popularity of autobiographies and biographies has mushroomed in 21st century Britain. I wish someone would tell us. Meeting and communicating with people makes the world go round, of course, so perhaps the fact that … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged Anton Chekhov, Artemis Cooper, autobiography, biographies, biography, Boris Johnson, Cazalets, Claire Harman, comments, Constance Sutton, Damian Collins, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Fatal Purity, Frederick the Great, George Calderon, Harvey Pitcher, John Aubrey: My Own Life, Kittie Calderon, Matthew Dennison, Maximilien de Robespierre, Peter Ackroyd, Philip Sassoon, Richard Chartres, Ruth Scurr, The Great War, Thomas Carlyle, Vita Sackville-West, William Shakespeare, Winston Churchill, World War I
2 Comments
Percy Lubbock: ‘Esoteric and intimate portraiture’
One of Ruth Scurr’s aims in John Aubrey: My Own Life was to ‘produce a portrait’ of Aubrey, but naturally she did not write it in the biographical genre known as ‘literary portrait’. This genre seems to have grown out … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged Archie Ripley, biographies, biography, character, comments, Earlham, empathy, George Calderon, Golden Square, Henry James, John Aubrey, John Masefield, Katy George, Kittie Calderon, literary portraits, Lytton Strachey, Marcel Proust, Mary Cholmondeley, Percy Lubbock, Piers Brendon, Ruth Scurr, William Caine
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Ruth Scurr: ‘A book in which he is still alive’
If in her first biography Ruth Scurr’s identity approached that of Robespierre as a ‘friend’, in John Aubrey: My Own Life (2015) she seems to have merged her identity with Aubrey altogether. The fundamental problem of modern biography, Scurr has written elsewhere, … Continue reading
Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged biographies, biography, Clare Hopkins, comments, diaries, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, Hilary Mantel, John Aubrey, John Aubrey: My Own Life, Maximilien de Robespierre, Michael Holroyd, Ruth Scurr, Trinity College Oxford
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‘…but Mr Jones does look a nice dog’
After enduring a long bout of illness and the first anniversary of George’s disappearance at Gallipoli, in the summer of 1916 Kittie decided she must channel her energies into a number of useful and therapeutic activities. One of these was … Continue reading →