Bill Lewis: ‘The Turning’

Posted on January 1, 2026 by Patrick Miles

Bill Lewis performing at the 2024 Rainham Poetry Festival. His shaman’s drum was made for him by a Native American craftsman from elk skin stretched on a cedar wood frame.

Kevin Bailey, editor of the long-running HQ Poetry Magazine, has described Bill Lewis as ‘one of our best contemporary poets’. Lewis is a national poet: he is rooted in his rural Kentish childhood (he was a founder of the Medway Poets), but his spirit flies to the ends of the world (particularly the Spanish-speaking world) and in between lies Britain. He is a magical realist who converses with foxes, bears, birds and the Green Man. He has true duende.

THE TURNING

Aspects of the year arm wrestle.

The running of the deer
On the bright apron of snow

As you sit sceptred
Holly-crowned and mistletoed

While nine cold children rise
From the ashes of the universe.

Fire you old shape-shifter, I have
Seen so many versions of you.

Invisible doors open and
An unseen messenger passes
Amongst the guests causing
All conversation to fall silent.

These are the Dead Days
Between one year and the next.
Castaway on an island made
Of unread and unwritten books

I remember my father using
A scythe to cut grass.
I remember a war that was
Fought decades before my birth.

I remember a tin bath that
Hung on the wall in the yard
It became symbol of our shame.

Black volcanic sand falls from
One glass chamber to the next.

I miss you now that you
No longer live in the mirror.
I came early to party and
Want to be the last to leave.

Now even the dead days have died.
January is up ahead and the god
Of doorways will close the white door
And open the green door for me.

Janus is such a Gentleman but no one
Asked if I wanted to step through.

He can look in two directions at once.
What use is that? Maybe for crossing
Roads but that’s look right, left then

Right again whereas he looks forward
And back. I ask myself is this a gift?
I think it is a curse to see all the mistakes
And good times that are now history.

The final door is steel. Behind it a furnace.

The running of the deer: from ‘The Holly and the Ivy’
Nine cold children: refers to the 1962 Hammer film The Damned

The traditional Yuletide ‘hooden horse‘ of Kent today (Deal Hoodeners)

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Bill Lewis, Christmas, Dead Days, Deal Hoodeners, drums, duende, fathers, Green Man, Hammer films, hooden horses, Janus, Kent, Medway Poets, Native Americans, New Year, nine cold children, nuclear holocaust, shamans, The Damned, The Holly and the Ivy, The Turning, World War I, Yuletide | Leave a comment

Joseph Brodsky: A Christmas poem

Posted on December 15, 2025 by Patrick Miles

‘The Flight into Egypt’ by Giotto di Bondone (1304–1306, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua)

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, they had each other. Secondly,
Mary and Joseph and Child were a three,
and whatever was happening, cooking, or traded,
from now on at least into three was divided.

As the bigger is wont to bend over the little
the frost-seized heavens above their poor bivvy
gleamed with a star — which had nowhere to hide
henceforth from the gaze of this bundled up Child.

Their campfire still flickered, though fuel was over;
all of them slept. The star differed from others
less by its brightness, which seemed too severe,
than its power to mingle the far with the near.

25 December 1990

❄️ A very Happy Christmas to all Calderonia’s subscribers and visitors! ❄️

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

‘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

‘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.

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 | Leave a comment

The diary of a writer-publisher: 35

Posted on December 1, 2025 by Patrick Miles

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 comforting, as though it were a sort of sign from the beyond, or a ‘second presence’. I had discussed this well attested phenomenon (in one case, a couple of barn owls flew in and perched on the coffin) with John Polkinghorne in our dialogathon published as What Can We Hope For? in 2019:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

On 6 October the newspaper printed a brief letter from me drawing attention to the relevant pages (50-52), but they cut the page reference. I then discovered that butterflies weren’t specifically indexed (the phenomenon comes under ‘animism’), so I don’t know how Times readers could be expected to find the subject in a 90-page book. I hope they weren’t disappointed. But when we looked yesterday at the sales for our books through Amazon, there was a conspicuous spike for What Can We Hope For? after 6 October!

(Ol’ga Leonardovna was unsettled by the fact that a ‘large black moth’ flew into the hotel room at Badenweiler where Chekhov had just died and beat itself against lights.)

30 October
It is, of course, very good news that Trump has at last sanctioned Russia’s biggest oil companies and that the Coalition of the Willing is getting its act together to inject Russia’s frozen overseas assets into the Ukrainian war economy. Even so, there is relatively little in our newspapers these days about the war and yesterday Roger Boyes wrote in The Times of the ‘rotten heart of European war fatigue’ under the headline ‘I hate to say it, but Kyiv won’t last till spring: for all the EU’s rousing words, there just isn’t the money or the will to keep defending Ukraine’. Surprisingly for Boyes, who is a very respectable commentator, I think he has muddled cause and effect in this article. I still maintain that the will to help Ukraine defeat Putin remains firm both in Britain and Europe. The will isn’t fatigued. But if the money literally isn’t there, then of course it won’t be possible to implement the will. However, it is going to be to Europe’s everlasting shame if it doesn’t come up with the money to match the existing will (which Boyes brands ‘rhetoric’). So it is a question now not of the will but of the determination. Nor do I personally underestimate Trump’s increasing impatience with Putin. In his own eyes, Trump is not ‘a loser’.

13 November

A qualified subscriber has jocularly asked: ‘Why on earth did you bring that stuffed seagull into the first line of your translation of Brodsky’s “October madrigal”, as though you were Shamraev in Act 4 of Chekhov’s play? There is no “gull” in Brodsky’s poem, or faintest whiff of one, just a “stuffed female quail on the mantelpiece”!’

Quite so. Actually the two lines translate literally as ‘a stuffing [chuchelo] of a female quail/stands on the mantelpiece’. That is how you say in Russian what we say in English as ‘a stuffed female quail’. Except that in English you can’t say ‘stuffed’ here of the bird as it would suggest a culinary delicacy involving shallots, herbs etc. (There is another meaning of ‘stuffed’, of course, and that too could interfere here; there’s definitely a sense in the play that by Act 4 Nina is a ‘stuffed seagull’.) So how do you not say ‘a stuffed female quail’? Well, these days perhaps a chuchelo is more a solid ‘model’ of a female quail? We can’t tell which Joseph Brodsky saw/meant in 1971, as he is not here to tell us.

The solution I hit on was to get the adjectival participle ‘stuffed’ away from qualifying ‘female quail’: by saying first that a stuffed seagull did not grace the mantelpiece, I could convey that a stuffed female quail did without having to repeat ‘stuffed’ to qualify ‘quail’. I liked this solution (a) because it was a solution, (b) because you might well expect a stuffed seagull in a cottage by the sea, not a quail, (c) it is a joke, alluding to the hilarious stuffed seagull appearing upstage in Act 4 of the play, and Joseph Brodsky loved ‘allusions’.

But there is another problem: ‘female quail’. Yes, perepelka is the feminine form of perepel, a quail. The female is perhaps more attractive, with her speckledy breast, but it is too late to ask Joseph whether he knew it was a hen bird, or just needed the extra syllable and rhyme. In any case, the -elka ending could equally well be a diminutive/affectionate form; the accepted affectionate form of perepel, perepelochka, would have had too many syllables and anyway have sounded tautological, since the bird is tiny in the first place. So I chose to take perepelka as an affectionate form; a ‘darling’ quail to the lovers.

I don’t like ‘explaining’ a translation — they either work for the reader or they don’t — but equally I feel a reader’s gauntlet deserves to be picked up. Who said translation was easy?

20 October
I can imagine the mirth triggered in some subscribers by the communication on the Goathead Press’s new website that my book of twenty short stories ‘will be published in early 2026’. They doubtless recall more vividly than I do the trail of missed publication dates for this book that has been laid by announcements on Calderonia over the past year!

‘Going forward’, yes, it is so. If I am honest with myself, the main reason is that the last story in the collection, ‘Pouring Out’, has taken me far longer to write than I was expecting. Maybe it will completed before Christmas. But I should also say that the unplanned turmoil with Sam&Sam has taken up a great deal of our time since 16 June. Getting a basic website like the Goathead Press’s up and running may not look very complicated, but as well as the new ‘Who We Are’ it included checking all our stock figures connecting directly with PayPal, updating all three postage rates for every one of our available books after weighing them, adding new books, compiling the new list of secondhand books, buying the website name etc etc. Well, it’s done and we have already had some nice feedback.

What it means, though, for this blog is that I shall probably be posting only once a month from now until February 2026. My name really would be mud if I didn’t get The White Bow/Ghoune out when I said this time! I will try to post things seasonal, of course.

30 November
As I write, Ukraine’s delegation (now led by Rustem Umerov) is in the U.S. to discuss Steve Witkoff’s 28-point peace plan. Witkoff has come in for a lot of mockery for his apparent amateurism and I think that using only Putin’s interpreters in his three-day Miami discussions with Dmitriev was probably unconstitutional (treasonous). Witkoff appears simply to have swallowed Russia’s maximalist wish-list. But nothing less than that would have got the Russians on board. Whether it was a conscious bait or not, it has succeeded in at last hooking Putin onto serious negotiations. It will now be difficult for Putin to ditch the peace process — although he promptly rejected the Europeans’ rewriting of Witkoff’s plan, of course. Putin lost his war long ago, he knows it, and is now entangled in a Trumpian ‘deal’. That’s about as positively as one can put it. Ukraine has not won the war and looks as though it is going to lose the peace. Sorry, I mean ‘peace’.

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

‘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

‘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.

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? | Leave a comment

Goathead is launched

Posted on November 10, 2025 by Patrick Miles

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 owned and based exclusively in this realm of England. Here is the link to the new website:

thegoatheadpress.co.uk

We hope you will like it!

Patrick and James Miles,
Cambridge U.K.
10 November 2025

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged Cambridge, England, independent publishers, James Miles, love poetry, Moscow, Patrick Miles, Russia, Sam&Sam, samizdat, Samuel Goathead, self-publishing, sonnets, The Goathead Press | 1 Comment

Goathead: The Complete Sonnets

Posted on October 15, 2025 by Patrick Miles

As promised in our previous post, here is a facsimile of the first, only, and definitive edition of all the sonnets of Samuel Goathead, published ‘by CUP’ in 1975:

© Patrick Miles, 1975

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged anniversaries, bears, Belial, breeches, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, coins, gardening, George Steiner, goats, J.H. Prong, Jacobean poetry, King's College, mice, Moscow, Muscovy, pansies, parodies, River Cam, Samuel Goathead, sonnets, St Anthony, The Complete Sonnets of Samuel Goathead, Walter Snail, William Shakespeare | Leave a comment

Announcing: THE GOATHEAD PRESS

Posted on October 1, 2025 by Patrick Miles

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:

The header for the old Sam&Sam site.

A selection of books from the old Sam&Sam site.

I refused to waste much time over who had perpetrated this, because I realised it was a blessing in disguise. I had been dithering too long for my Russian publishing partner’s good about severing his public association with me; now I had to do it. So I am setting up a new imprint which will be exclusively based in Britain.

What to call it?

Well, I once explained the origin of Sam&Sam on Calderonia, so you can see there that not only did the Sam bit back in 1974 stand for ‘self’, as in samizdat (self-publishing), but each of the two publishers, Russian and English, had written sonnets under the name of Samuel Goathead, purportedly a Jacobean poet. So I thought old Sam&Sam should transmogrify into The Goathead Press. Its website will be available in November. Sam&Sam will exist as an exclusively Russia-based and Russian-owned imprint.

The Goathead Press’s logo will be far removed from that of Sam&Sam, which had as its motto (in Russian) ‘The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’. The new logo will be the goat’s head that I drew on the frontispiece of the 1975 edition of Goathead’s sonnets, to which the great poet obligingly set his hand. The spade and rake symbolise Goathead’s early life as a gardener, and his Latin motto means ‘I never give in’.

Frontispiece to 1975 edition, Goathead Press logo at top

For the world’s enlightenment, we will publish a facsimile of the 1975 Complete Sonnets of Samuel Goathead on Calderonia in a fortnight’s time. When I was providing the ‘originals’ of my co-publisher’s Russian sonnets of S.G. in Moscow nearly fifty years ago, I also gave him a copy of the Signet Classic edition of John Donne and inscribed it thus: ‘Take, O friend, and savour it,/This book of poems by my favourite — /Whose reputation, though, seems bloated,/ When you compare him with Samuel Goathead.’

The Goathead Press will continue to sell books in Russian published by Sam&Sam in Russia, but will concentrate on its own and other small presses’ new English-language titles. The ‘Who we are’ blurb will say that the Goathead Press is ‘owned and managed exclusively by Patrick Miles and James Miles in Cambridge, UK’. Serendipitously, Jim tells me that in the language of his generation GOAT stands for ‘Greatest Of All Time’…

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged GOAT, Jacobean poets, James Miles, John Donne, Moscow, Patrick Miles, rebranding, Russia, Sam&Sam, samizdat, self-publishing, sonnets, The Complete Sonnets of Samuel Goathead, The Goathead Press | Leave a comment

Joseph Brodsky: ‘October madrigal’

Posted on September 15, 2025 by Patrick Miles

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 aside your book, take up your needle;
sit and darn my shirt, no lamp is needed
in your corner:
hair gold lights all.

1971

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

‘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

‘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.

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 | Leave a comment

Joseph Brodsky: ‘I put my arms…’

Posted on September 1, 2025 by Patrick Miles

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 the corner sofa shone
yellow, though actually brown.
The table was bare, a floorboard gleamed,
the stove just darkled, a dusty frame
froze dead its landscape, only one thing
seemed animate to me: the sideboard.
But a tiny moth whirred round the room,
which broke my stare’s rigidity.
And if a ghost once did live here,
then it has left this house. It’s left it.

1962

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged 'I put my arms...', 'Ia obnial eti plechi...', furniture, ghosts, Joseph Brodsky, love poetry, Marina Basmanova, moths, poetry translation, Russian literature, Russian poetry, translation | 1 Comment

The diary of a writer-publisher: 34

Posted on August 4, 2025 by Patrick Miles

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 this summer in yellow and blue, his promoter said: ‘That’s a bit 2022, isn’t it?’ Morrison (who is usually spot on) ‘senses’ that this is ‘how a lot of people in the arts and entertainment world now feel about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though few would admit it’.

We should distinguish here between ‘arts leaders’ and ‘promoters’, i.e. publicists. The latter are of course principally concerned with what’s ‘next’, flashy and ephemeral. Moreover, as Morrison says, ‘the news cycle moves on relentlessly’. But I honestly do not get any sense that people in the arts, whether leaders or more humble practitioners, have changed their views on Ukraine and war criminal Putin by one jot. It is only the public projection of their views that has changed, for instance one hardly sees a Ukrainian flag in Cambridge these days or a poster for a concert in aid of the country fighting for its life.

People tire of advertising and repeating themselves. Belief in the justice of Ukraine’s cause and admiration for the Ukrainian people’s grit and war leader haven’t, in my experience, diminished in Britain. One has to admit, though, that projecting the belief and keeping its public profile high is important — not least for the message it sends Putin. I am therefore edging towards unfurling a twenty-foot Ukrainian flag down the front of our house:

7 July
Why, I don’t know, but I cannot stop thinking of Joseph Brodsky — what an amazing, real person he was, how formative it was for me reading his early poetry in Russia in samizdat, and meeting him there and subsequently in England. For the umpteenth time, certain lines of his keep going through my head and my brain compulsively tries to recreate them in English…so far to no avail, as with a Christmas poem of his that I annually tackle mentally. It is the music of the lines that obsesses one, of course…and that is unique to his Russian words. But there are all kinds of other obstacles to translating him.

For example, I have always been mesmerised by his 1962 poem (dedicated, apparently, to his then partner Marina Basmanova) that begins ‘I embraced these shoulders and glanced/at what was behind [her] back’. It’s mysterious; naturalistic but metaphysical. It’s a kind of 16-line sonnet, four abab quatrains fairly conventionally rhymed, yet ends (so musically in the original) with a hint at a Shakespearian couplet: ‘And if a ghost ever lived here, /it has left this house. Left it.’ But one of the problems about translating the poem is that the original is a five-stress line, which is too long in English for what is being said, but is a four-stress line in English long enough? Another is that it works in the original Russian through a perfect command of regular iambs, which would be too dull in English. And rhyming it would be too heavy. Or if one didn’t use pure rhymes but assonances, split rhymes etc, that would be a distraction from the simplicity of the poem; pretentious.

Epigram by Joseph Brodsky written out in Leningrad on 11 January 1970

The 1971 ten-line poem ‘Song in October’ seems to me rare in Brodsky’s poetry for its sheer imagism (almost a couple of tanka) — although, as always, there is the deep music that is irresistible. We have a stuffed quail on a mantelpiece…the ticking of an old clock…the dull roar of the sea against its wall…no need to light a lamp because a woman’s gold hair glows in the corner… I see no problems with any of that, the rhymes or the varied line-lengths, but have never been able to read Otlozhi svoiu knigu, voz’mi iglu;/shtopai moe bel’ë without bursting out laughing, as it seems to me the natural translation would be: ‘Put your book aside, take up the needle;/darn [mend] my pants’! And I would say from experience that in 1971 the notion of one’s girl friend, partner or even wife darning one’s socks or other garments was already anachronistic. The word bel’ë means ‘linen’ in the collective sense, ‘underclothes’ today, but asks to be translated by something more specific like vest or pants, yet this would be bathos of the first order. Joseph knew English extremely well; it’s such a pity he can’t settle this for us. And why underclothes?

15 July
We have just been on a car trip to Wiltshire, Somerset, Dorset, Hampshire and Kent in search of butterflies that we had never seen before, and the rare reptiles Sand Lizard and Smooth Snake. The weather was perfect, of course, though perhaps too hot for the Smooth Snakes and Adders that we failed to see. The Sand Lizard was obliging, however:

Photograph by Will Miles 2025

The number of species of butterfly we saw was flabbergasting: 35 out of Britain’s total 59. This was far larger than we were expecting and because hatches have been almost a month earlier this year we did not think we would see the rarities Large Blue, Purple Emperor, Silver-Studded Blue, Lulworth Skipper and Heath Fritillary; but we did. The Large Blue became extinct in the UK in 1979 owing to agricultural changes and myxomatosis that affected its ant hosts. An extremely clever programme of introduction of the Swedish form has now been crowned with success and some years they can be seen in their scores at highly protected sites. We had to comb a meadow with binoculars before we saw one, as it really was the end of their season, but I think this photograph of the newly hatched female in flight conveys the butterfly’s full loveliness:

Photograph by Will Miles 2025

After this, it is difficult to believe there is much wrong with butterfly conservation in Britain. Alas, though, for the once common Small Tortoiseshell!

1 August
Since April, large but not deep white bookcases have appeared in Heffers containing all 90 of the new Penguin Archive series of paperbacks brought out to commemorate the ninetieth anniversary of Penguin’s foundation. The books are white with ‘typographical’ covers only and contain one work by great authors, or several works, amounting to about 130 pages. They cost £5.99 each. The series seems a good idea that will encourage people to read, say, Katherine Mansfield’s ‘A Dill Pickle’ or George Orwell’s ‘Can Socialists Be Happy?’, who would not otherwise have bought collections in which these works appear. I chose this one, because I had never read a short story by Woolf before, only novels:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

I’ve now read the book twice and some of the stories more times than that. A revelation. The plots are very simple but the common subject is of the dire essence: people in Edwardian/Georgian Britain who are determinedly living out their mauvaise foi and amongst them individuals who are at various stages of tearing themselves free from it. It’s as humanly true now as when the stories were written (1917-44). I particularly recommend ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’, ‘The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection’, and ‘The New Dress’ itself. The so-called ‘stream of consciousness’ is very controlled and the stories’ most powerful dimension. But what amazed me most was seeing the First World War break into these stories in a discreet but devastating fashion. We once in Calderonia debated the presence of the War in Lawrence’s Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but I must confess that I had never expected to see it so clearly in Woolf.

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

‘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

‘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.

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 | 2 Comments

My bond with Bond

Posted on July 1, 2025 by Patrick Miles

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 only Bond left on my shelves, although at the time I read at least four of the others and certainly owned more than Dr No. It’s quite possible that I hung on to the latter because the film of Dr No came out in the same year, I saw it, and as a fourteen-year-old boy was particularly impressed by the paperback’s cover:

As you may recall, avians (not to say birds) play an important part in Dr No. There are the cormorants who excrete the guano that Julius No mines, there is the colony of Roseate Spoonbills on Crab Key Island that the Audubon Society is passionate about conserving, and other species flit through the novel. I am delighted to tell you, from consulting Bond’s Birds of the West Indies, that Fleming’s references to them are accurate.

Moreover, I did not find the novel as bad as I was expecting. It is laughable that Evelyn Waugh should criticise the ‘sadism’ of the Bond books when his own satire is horribly sadistic and his Catholicism so morbid. There is humour, a delight in beauty, a great sensuousness and quickness in Fleming’s writing that Waugh was wise never to attempt. I enjoyed all that in my re-reading of Dr No, but my interest flagged halfway through when the fantasy and fake psychology took over. The problem is genre. The early chapters set in London and Kingston are pacy, they show more than tell, and the details are beautifully observed; so these chapters read like a very good realistic novel, at least as good as Graham Greene. Superhuman endurance, a fire-breathing dragon, a man with his heart on the right, a giant squid in an underwater cage, a naked blonde Venus, Julius No’s obliging seven-page account of his life and beliefs, belong in the genre of the spy fantasy novel — a genre I can’t really connect with and one that I’m sure Waugh had no time for.

Dr No was the first Bond film and when it appeared a cult of it, the novels and Sean Connery broke out at my school. No doubt it was the violence, action, suspense and sex that kept us turning the pages, but I feel it was really the chic of it all that grabbed us most: the Sunbeam Talbot, the Royal Blend cigarettes, the caviar double de Beluga, the Floris Lime bath essence and Guerlain bathcubes, the Walther PPK 7.65 mm, the Vesper Martini… It was a kind of consumer fetishism to go with the sexual. Boys started wearing blue Sea Island cotton shirts with black knitted ties and looking coolly tough.

Our English master did not approve of the novels (he was a Leavisite). I must say the phenomenon intrigued me so much that, using several carbons, I bashed out on my typewriter a questionnaire intended to discover whether and why the boys in my year were so taken by Bond. I thought the results would make an interesting article for the school magazine. Extra cachet, it occurred to me, would accrue if I could interview Fleming during one of his visits to Sandwich Bay. He was a member of Royal St George’s Golf Club and a boy in our class even had a relative who was the model for Alfred Blacking in the famous Goldfinger golf match! So I wrote to Fleming. Knowing his popularity and busy intercontinental life, I did not seriously expect a reply. Yet one came:

The letter is a model of writerly patience, politeness and straight talking towards a fifteen-year-old nuisance. I assume it was typed by a secretary, as the layout and accuracy look professional. ‘Opera’ here means ‘works’ and his use of the word is perhaps deliberately uncondescending to a grammar school boy. But what touches me most is that when Fleming came to sign he decided it should end in an exclamation mark, so he put the top part of that in by hand. I also liked his pun on bondage. Above all, his sheer kindness in writing and sending the Harvard parody staggered me. Naturally, I thanked him.

I am jolly glad I kept Ian Fleming’s letter, because I was far more cavalier as a teenager about binning or giving things away than I am now. I abandoned the Bond questionnaire because it was too time consuming. Not one sample has survived. The Harvard parody, by Christopher Cerf and Michael K. Frith, was in the form of a Signet-style paperback called Alligator. It was amusing, but I lent it to someone and never saw it again. I wrote a sketch on consumerism in Bond for That Was the Week That Was and never even kept a copy. I also wrote a long parody myself called something like Basil Don Bond and the Mystery of Crane Fly Island. It was written on a whole quarto pad of Basildon Bond. My mother came across it in my room, read it, and vehemently declared it ‘a waste of paper’! Needing to get it out of the house, therefore, I passed it to a schoolfriend, who chortled over it. Unfortunately, when he left home for university his mother came across the manuscript, read it, and threw it out with his other debris. This was perhaps connected with the fact that the last two sentences — and the only words I can remember — were:

Bond pulled hard at the oars and the girl sat in the prow of the boat. She was wearing only a newspaper.

Ah, youth!

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

‘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

‘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.

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 | Leave a comment

The diary of a writer-publisher: 33

Posted on May 26, 2025 by Patrick Miles

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 the editor has just sent me a cheque as joint winner of the Haiku Award for that issue.

Since these were my first haiku ever published in the magazine, I can only surmise that an awful lot of its readers like and, as humans put it, ‘own’ cats. For the published text reads:

twenty years on
the cat’s paws just visible
in concrete

Calderonians with long memories may remember my jotting it down last summer; but I have tweaked it slightly. What amuses me is that the prize works out at a rate of £4000 per thousand words — which, of course, I have never been paid in my life before…

30 March

The best defended compost heap in Britain?

Our immediate neighbours at the allotments are Polish, Italian, Brazilian, Indian, Chinese and British. Whether this diversity is typical of allotments, I don’t know, but it certainly leads to a wide range of styles of cultivation and management, some of which may appear incomprehensible to the Britocentric observer. But then the cordon of perfectly cultivated stinging nettles round our own compost heap must seem equally eccentric to our neighbours. Are we growing the nettles to eat? (I’ve tried nettles and they are bland.) Is our compost so special that we are afraid of it being stolen? (No.) Are the badgers who ate our neighbours’ sweet corn and hen’s eggs deterred by nettles? (Possibly.)

The true answer is that this compost heap is complete and won’t be dug out until Christmas, so we can afford to let the nettles take over. And two years ago we had a large colony of caterpillars of this now scarce butterfly chomping away on the nettles:

In my youth, the Small Tortoiseshell was one of the commonest of British butterflies. Experts are not sure why its numbers have declined so sharply in recent decades, but a convincing hypothesis is that a fly that parasitizes them has become more common owing to climate change. So we should encourage any Small Tortoiseshell female passing through the allotment to lay eggs here, even if the numerous robins won’t help her caterpillars. Every autumn I cut all the nettles down and ferment them with comfrey leaves in a tub to mulch the rhubarb patches over the winter. Very effective.

17 April
Sam2 always gives me unexpected book presents, for example John Polkinghorne‘s Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction in Japanese, or a beautifully illustrated tome about Japanese vending machines. The latest is

Click the image to find this book on Amazon.

I’m really chuffed to have it, as I recall an ornithologist telling me in the 1960s that Ian Fleming, who loved birdwatching and lived at Goldeneye in Jamaica for three months of the year, stole 007’s name from the author of this book and I wondered what the book was like (it’s excellent). The edition Sam2 has given me is what I would call a photomechanical reprint of the 1936 original. It has an introduction in which one Sam Sloan quotes Fleming writing in The New Yorker: ‘I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened; I wanted him to be a blunt instrument […] when I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought by God, James Bond is the dullest name I ever heard.’ This doesn’t seem to have put the real James Bond off.

I was a fan of the James Bond spy novels, though I don’t much like the later films. I say ‘was’ a fan, because I haven’t read them for over sixty years. But I recently came across a letter Ian Fleming wrote me in the 1960s when I was editor of the school magazine, and this has given me an itch to re-read Dr No. I’ll blog a bit about the subject in July.

14 May
I am making a determined effort to sell my Russian library; which is not easy in the current climate. The Chekhov research part (392 books and thirty boxes of offprints etc) went to Nottingham University long ago, leaving 700 vols covering Russian literature, history and thought from the tenth century until now. I am selling for a variety of reasons. But I am not parting with those authors I really love and couldn’t live without.

Deciding who these are can be challenging. I am moving along the shelves, taking books down one by one, opening and flipping through them, ‘bringing them back to me’, noting from info on the flyleaf when I acquired them, whether they are inscribed by their authors, or have annotations…a slow process, especially when I suddenly decide I should re-read one! I’ve reached the late Soviet period, specifically certain women playwrights.

Nina Sadur is a rightly disturbing, utterly truthful and poetic writer whom I met in Britain around 1990. We instantly hit it off. Along my shelves, I came to the copy she gave me of her 44-page book of six short stories Ved’miny slezki (Witch’s Tears), published in 1989 at Novosibirsk in 50,000 copies, and I just had to take it down and re-read them:

Is she still alive, I wondered? No, she died in 2023, aged seventy-three… The next book on the shelf was a collection of plays by Liudmila Petrushevskaia. I think I was one of the first people to write about her plays in English, and I had some reservations. Is she still alive, I wondered? Yes, she is alive at eighty-six and since the 1990s has moved through story writing, novels, memoirs, painting, singing, animation… According to Wikipedia:

In 2023, Petrushevskaya announced that as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine she was no longer able to write, posting to social media that “This aggressive war, the sudden and inexplicable hatred by the majority of our (Russophone) nation for our neighbours and family, the Ukrainian people, have put an end to my profession”.

My reservations have deepened. Petrushevskaia’s statement defies rational analysis. What it unfortunately amounts to is the traditional Russian phenomenon of narod bezmolvstvuet (Pushkin, last line of Boris Godunov), meaning ‘the people say nothing’.

24 May
Are Donald Trump and his team as naive as they appear? This may be the most important issue in international politics for the next four years.

Trump has told the world that he is already getting tired of his fruitless efforts to persuade Putin to make peace and could walk away from the war altogether. What music to Putin’s ears! It threatens to split NATO and leave Ukraine with only a ‘coalition of the willing’ in Europe to back it. Donald, you don’t have the cards now: you have given them away…

So all Putin needs to do is make a few gestures like exchanging prisoners, and carry on battering Ukraine. Expect the war to continue worse than ever. As Zelensky has said, if it goes on for ten years ‘there will be nothing left of Ukraine’.

Are the European powers capable of giving Ukraine the assistance it needs to win? From about 2010 it was blindingly obvious that Russia was rearming and it was clear from Putin’s rhetoric and half-baked ideology what it was for: to invade sovereign, democratic countries and recreate the Greater Russia of his ghastly hero, Alexander III (a kind of Soviet Union without communism). Nothing was done in Europe to stop him: the seizure of Crimea was not contested with action, nor did NATO bring up forces in 2021 to the Zuwalki Gap and the Polish border near Brest, say, that might have deterred the invasion of western Ukraine. We are told that Germany, Poland and other mainland countries are frantically rearming. Can they do it fast enough to save Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the rest of us? Europe’s record of propensity to act against dictator-aggressors is not good.

I have thought for about fifteen years that European countries including Britain should raise their defence spending to at least 5% of GDP and prepare to defend themselves against Putin, not rely on the US, so in that respect I have agreed with Trump. He has done Europe a brutal favour by focussing its mind on self-defence. But again, will there actually be a ‘coalition of the willing’, including Britain, and will it be up to the task?

Putin has too much to lose from making peace with Ukraine and thanks to Trump’s naivety he believes he is winning. There is no alternative, then, to Ukraine and Europe fighting on to victory — without America, if the great card player so insists.

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

‘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

‘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.

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 | Leave a comment

Source?

Posted on May 12, 2025 by Patrick Miles

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 are right and would like one.

Click the image to enlarge.

In the past year, from a previous state of immunity, I have been acting as literary executor to three separate people. Amongst the meticulously prepared teaching materials of my old Russian supervisor, the late Dr Peter Squire, I came across twenty photocopies of this text, which was evidently intended for translation by students into Russian. Unusually, Peter had not supplied the name of the author at the end. But it’s such an amusing and interesting piece, I think, that I would like to know who wrote it — and read the rest. My first guess was that it was by George Orwell, but I can’t find it in his essays.

It’s interesting for a number of reasons. First, is what the author says about the ‘peculiar quality of English patience’ true? (It does correspond to my own experience of sixty years ago in a small rather self-contained south coast town, but aren’t we all far more ‘swift to wrath’ these days?) Second, is the ‘peculiar quality of English patience’ really ‘rooted in self-confidence’? Surely it is more likely to be rooted in procrastination and a lack of confidence about how to handle the situation? Isn’t the act of ‘dropping someone like a stone’ after putting up with them for years cruel and vindictive, as you’ve never given them the least inkling you’re like that, i.e. not actually a saint? Isn’t it an admission of defeat? Isn’t it a symptom of one’s own emotional inadequacy, as one’s not developed the ‘interpersonal skills’ to avoid such drastic and final action? And so on…

I think we should be told.

A special case is when men simply walk out of a house and marriage. There have been half a dozen instances of this in my acquaintance, but I don’t know of a woman who has done it. The marriages or relationships were between three and thirty years long and in one case even the police could not trace the exiter. One wonders, of course, whether the couples had been discussing their differences, or rowing, for years and the man felt he had reached a last straw moment, but that’s not the impression I received. It looked more like the bloke having decided that it was useless discussing their differences and his only course was to walk. Indeed, one woman stopped me in the street to tell me her partner had walked out but she had had no warning and did not have a clue why he had done it. (To me it seemed clear that they were incompatible, but that begs the question.) Whichever way you look at it, it’s cruel to do it, but I fear it’s just ‘the peculiar quality of English patience’ in action. Confronting the problem is judged too complex, time-consuming or doomed to failure. Another explanation is that both the ‘patience’ (‘putting up with it for years’) and the sudden ‘dropping’ convince the dropper that he’s both virtuous and in control.

About twenty-five years ago I was at an academic garden party and slagged off the university department I had been teaching in to the two people I was talking to. I then distinctly heard a husband and wife fifteen feet away agree that they were dropping me from their dinner party and Christmas card list! For me too it was a great relief.

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

‘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

‘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.

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 | 5 Comments

From ‘The Retiral of C.B.F. Warrington: A Science Fiction’ (Continued)

Posted on April 28, 2025 by Patrick Miles

Chapter 2

It was just before dusk and the warm undergrowth was alive with moving eyes, opening and closing as the Common Evening Browns flapped softly about in their hundreds. A young man kept netting them, examining them, and letting them go.

‘The variation on the underside is mind-boggling, isn’t it?’ he called over to a man in his thirties lighting a fire by two tents at the edge of the jungle. ‘Mottling – chocolate zigzags – leaf patterns – ocelli… Literally, no two are the same, yet they’re the same species!’

‘Yes…’

‘Hello, look at that – I’ve put up a warringtonii.’

‘Catch it! Is it a male?’

The young man stared into the open net, at the bottom of which hung a dark velvety shape.

‘I should say. I can smell it…’

‘Mark it, then, record, and release. The female must be here somewhere. Perhaps tomorrow morning.’

The two entomologists ate their tinned beans, sausages and processed cheese on the jungle side of the fire, from where they could observe a few huts and a wharf by the sea about a mile off. The elder (Senior Assistant Lepidopterist Peregrine Barratt) reached over to his rucksack and extracted a flat bottle of whisky. The younger (research assistant Toby Yates) was fingering a dried Striped Kukri Snake that he had come across earlier in the day. It had clearly died where it lay, because it looked like a large pretzel.

‘There they are, Perry!’ he exclaimed.

A launch swept round the bay and moored at the wharf.

‘Darn it,’ spat Barratt, ‘we’ll have to put this away, and tidy the camp up a bit, CUBE-fashion…’

He took the bottle to his tent, where he hid it in his sleeping bag, and they both aligned their pots, cooking utensils, nets, rifle and rucksacks as laid down in the Cramford University Borneo Expedition rulebook.

Five minutes later, a battered US Army Jeep drew up. The driver was a lumpy woman; next to her sat a hunched old man. Five people got out. The old man, the driver and another young woman went over to the fire, whilst a very tall man and a short, middle-aged woman hung back behind them.

‘Hello, Colin!’ Barratt addressed the old man. ‘And Sandra – Donna – hello…’

The old man was just short of medium height, wore steel-framed glasses, a khaki short-sleeved shirt and forage cap, and sported a leather pouch on his belt. He delivered ‘smiling eyes’ and a sort of nervous, wide open grin. Barratt and Yates stood by their fire, the latter still holding his snake.

‘Everything all right, Perry?’

‘Very good, Colin, so far – very productive. This is Toby Yates, the research assistant we took on in Cramford.’

‘Ah yes. We haven’t met. How do you do.’

‘I am very pleased to be on the expedition, Mr Warrington. Thank you.’

The ‘professor’ shifted on his feet and puffed up and down slightly, as though impatient.

‘Well, meet my assistants in the Department, Sandra Mounds and Donna Pearson.’

Yates smiled and nodded.

‘I hope you are not thinking of taking that snake home with you?’

‘Er…’ Yates looked at it.

‘Because specimens are not personal property and we only capture butterflies.’

‘Of course, Mr Warrington.’

‘Well, we’ll get settled at Alaska and see you tomorrow morning.’

They all got back into the Jeep and drove off.

‘Alaska?’ asked Yates.

Barratt laughed: ‘Don’t ask me! It’s just the collection of wartime huts that CUBE has had since the 1950s. Apparently F-Floret gave them that name in order to keep their existence secret – confidential.’

They settled round the fire.

‘By the way, Perry. Why is he only a Mister?’

‘Ah. It’s because he was a conscientious objector during the War and by the time he’d finished his service in India he was too old to do a Ph.D. He didn’t get the Chair, either. But he is the Horsfield Reader in Lepidopterology.’

‘It’s amazing to think that he discovered and described the Unguentary Crow at the age of twenty-seven.’

(For the other 23 chapters you will have to buy the collection of stories White Bow/Ghoune published this autumn!)

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure | Tagged Borneo, BPhARP, butterflies, Common Evening Brown, Cramford University, CUBE, Euploea warringtonii, Horsfield Reader in Lepidopterology, pheromones, science fiction, short stories, Striped Kukri Snake, The Retiral of C.B.F. Warrington, The Unguentary Crow, White Bow & Ghoune, Zoology Department | Leave a comment

From ‘The Retiral of C.B.F. Warrington: A Science Fiction’

Posted on April 14, 2025 by Patrick Miles

Chapter 1

Cuvier stood in front of the large notice-board at the Fly Building – so called because it had housed a group working on blow flies before the Butterfly Pheromone Attraction Research Programme moved in – then turned red in the face, pursed his lips into a point, and heaved with silent laughter. His eyes nearly drilled through a rectangle of paper that read:

SPECIAL NOTICE
Workers are reminded that it is an offence to remove official notices from this Notice Board. An official notice is a notice above my signature, typed on BPhARP official notepaper bearing the crest of the University. This special notice is an official notice. Administrative official notice FSN/244/90 has been withdrawn until further notice.
C.B.F. Warrington
Director

Chortling, the computer programmer walked briskly down the corridor to the Studio, a spacious sunlit room where six researchers had their work stations, but today only Bill Jones, a Senior Assistant Lepidopterist, was angled over his binocular microscope. Jones swung round on his stool.

‘That “special notice” is hilarious!’ spluttered Cuvier. ‘What’s it all about?’

‘Basil put up a notice detailing how all the tea mugs in the common room should be numbered…’

‘Why?’

‘To avoid infection, apparently. Each Butt-Parper was meant to have a number.’

Cuvier roared.

‘Someone took the notice down and replaced it with one instructing us how to fold our underpants!’ laughed Jones. ‘So I had to take that down before he got up here.’

Cuvier smirked: ‘Who do you think took the first notice down?’

‘No idea.’

‘I bet it was old Joan. She seems to have had enough of Floret’s “style” when they did fieldwork together as students.’

‘Quite possible. What I’d like to know is, who reported to Basil that his notice had gone? He hasn’t been up here for weeks.’

‘Dumper,’ suggested Cuvier. ‘She comes up here regularly from Zoology, doesn’t she?’

‘Mmm…she doesn’t have a room here, of course.’

‘That woman’s into everything. I wonder why she voted against buying the minicomputer? She couldn’t possibly have understood the issues. But at least we won. Did you get the order off OK?’

‘Yes…’ Jones paused with a smile. ‘I shot straight up here on my bike, bashed it out, and stuffed it First Class into the pillar box round the corner. Before Basil could change his mind.’

‘Ex-cellent! Can I have a word with you? Where are Floret, Dumper and D2? They’re not in the Department.’

‘No, they’re at his house, finalizing the expedition. What’s it about?’

‘Well, although we’ve now got the computer – and that can handle anything – I have a whole bag of questions about the PapDats system which we need to discuss with Floret…and, I suppose, others. Really, it comes down to the fact that there’s never been a clear definition of what he’s trying to achieve – only vague generalisations.’

‘Oh God…’ Jones said under his breath. ‘Do you think so?’

‘There’s absolutely no problem with your chemistry database, Peregrine’s collection catalogue, or the diddly publications library, it’s having to cater for more and more and more of the whole butterfly in PapDats that is driving me crazy. Do our subscribers want it? Does anyone except Basil want it?’

‘I can’t see you getting a meeting, Ev, before they go. I suggest you put it all on one side of paper and circulate it. They’re flying out on Tuesday.’

‘Right. I’ll do that.’

They broke off and had coffee together. When Cuvier had gone, Jones returned to his stool, unlocked a drawer in the bench, and took out a weighty-looking document. It was headed: ‘CONFIDENTIAL. Memorandum to BPhARP workers as CBFW retires and BPhARP – PapDats – CUBE moves on.’

(Chapter 2 follows on 28 April)

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure | Tagged Bill Jones, BPhARP, butterflies, computers, databases, Dumper, Evan Cuvier, PapDats, pheromones, Sandra Mounds, science fiction, short stories, The Retiral of C.B.F. Warrington, White Bow & Ghoune, Zoology Department | Leave a comment

In Memoriam Keith Dewhurst

Posted on March 31, 2025 by Patrick Miles

KEITH DEWHURST
24 December 1931 – 11 January 2025

The English language talks of ‘the quick and the dead’. Occasionally Keith would start a sentence with ‘When I am dead…’, but I assured him he never would be, because all the words he had ever written were ‘quick’. His mind was so quick that even in his nineties I felt he was light years ahead of me. His judgement was piercing and expressed in one-liners without a dud word. ‘The theatre is in a situation where a morally good (by its own definition) opinion is all you need.’ ‘What would it be like, a world with which women were satisfied?’ ‘The real problem of decline is that people aren’t aware of it, don’t you agree?’ ‘The dog has chewed up my arthritis gloves.’ And, of course, football was always a metaphor for theatre, and vice versa: ‘The goalposts don’t move, Jimmy Murphy said to Bobby Charlton, so don’t look at them. Look at the ball, and put your foot through the middle of it. That could be Chekhov talking to an actor!’

In recent years, Keith would rather wistfully quote the line from Richard II: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.’ But nothing could be further from the truth in Keith’s case. At the age of 80 he had an explosion of different creativity from his youth. Between 2021 and 2024 he published five books: a warming theatrical novel The History of Polly Bowler, another novel Dancing Bear, the mind-bendingly ingenious mystery trilogy Venice Three, a book of short stories, Autumnia, and four dazzling new plays (two about feminists, one about the post-Copperfield career of Little Emily as a courtesan and diva, another about Karl Marx’s life in Ventnor). ‘I’ve only just learnt how to write!’ he told me. ‘Wasn’t lockdown marvellous? Self-isolation is what writers seek above all, but for the most part the world denies them it.’ All this at the age of 92! And what he wrote in different genres was so vibrant, so in the present, more honestly focussed on Britain’s problems than many a young writer. Through it all flowed Keith’s mischievous, sometimes risqué humour. A year after he had written to me with a cutting from the Telegraph about the state of the British theatre, I noticed that on the back of it there is a large photograph of David Attenborough advertising his series Secret World of Sound and talking to a starling… Keith has doodled a big moustache on Sir David and drawn a balloon from the starling’s beak with three words in it: ‘CALL MY AGENT’!

Patrick Miles

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

‘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

‘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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Anton Chekhov, Autumnia, Bobby Charlton, Dancing Bear, David Attenborough, David Copperfield, feminism, football, In memoriam, Jimmy Murphy, Karl Marx, Keith Dewhurst, Little Emily, Richard II, starlings, The History of Polly Bowler, theatre, theatre agents, Venice 3, Ventnor, William Shakespeare | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 32

Posted on March 17, 2025 by Patrick Miles

9 February 2025
I have unsubscribed from Twitter after ten years or so. It was useful for marketing Sam&Sam books, especially George Calderon: Edwardian Genius in 2018, but I think the quality of Tweets and even images was far higher back then. I first considered ditching it when Musk became owner and started ploughing his own political furrow on Twitter/X. I stayed on, however, because the real-time Tweets about the war were so informative. Now, even they are less useful and the fake news content (about everything) is higher. TBH, it has become boring and not worth the time it takes to flick through and read it.

21 February
Well if I hadn’t finished with Twitter twelve days ago, I would now:

Musk communicated these disgusting falsehoods on ‘his’ social media platform X/Twitter. They well match Trump’s preceding calumnies that Ukraine ‘started’ the war and could have ‘ended it three years ago’. The only way in which Ukraine could have achieved the latter was by promptly capitulating to the aggressor! Is this what Trump had in mind? He never once mentions the concepts ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, or ‘sovereignty’, which for Ukrainians and Europeans are what the war is about, only ‘debt’, minerals and money.

I said before the American election that I would not comment on Trump’s plan to end the war until we could see what it actually is, and I am sticking to that. However, we have heard enough this week from Trump and Musk to be able to say that their barefaced mendacity is indistinguishable from Putin’s own Russian brand, vran’e (compulsive lying). Is blatant lying just a Trump ploy? If so, the Russians have certainly fallen for it…but such travesties of the truth cannot bode well for an honest, fair and trustworthy peace.

1 March
The funeral of my ever-young friend Keith Dewhurst takes place next Friday, 7th, on the Isle of Wight, and to my chagrin I am unable to be there, even though I had written a tribute to Keith immediately after he passed ‘mildly away’, as Donne puts it, on 11 January after celebrating his ninety-third birthday on Christmas Eve. I was thoroughly expecting to read it in person in February, but it seems it is quite ‘normal’ these days for funerals to take up to two months to be ‘facilitated’… Well, at least it provides plenty of time to organise them, and in the case of Keith this means, I am sure, that it will be a performance of the highest theatrical order. I will post my shortened tribute here at the end of March.

It’s a fact that I got to know Keith well only in the last four years of his life. We talked about everything under the sun — both in the flesh and in long letters, as he still preferred writing by hand — and I had the honour of contributing the introduction to his last four plays. I had previously known him only in 1990, when his adaptation of Bulgakov’s short novel A Theatre Romance had a glorious run at the National Theatre as Black Snow, directed by Bill Gaskill. Keith commissioned me to do a literal translation of the novel and I introduced him to Julie Curtis, a Bulgakov scholar then working in Cambridge, who gave him consultancy on the novel/play that he remembered for the rest of his life.

The cast of Keith Dewhurst’s play Lark Rise after Flora Thompson, directed by Bill Bryden and Sebastian Graham-Jones at the National Theatre, 1978

There are three incidents I remember from working with Keith on Black Snow that I couldn’t allude to in my Word for him, because the last four years greatly outweigh them; so let me mention them here. First, when he received my literal translation, he rang me up to thank me for it and its ‘freshness’ from the opening line (which he kept speaking). No-one had ever done this before, although I had produced half a dozen literals for the NT by then. Second, I was at a meal with him, his wife the theatre agent Alexandra Cann, and a well known theatre director, and the conversation concerned where the latter’s career was going. After saying nothing for half an hour, Keith came out with: ‘You stayed too long in that [named theatre company] job.’ No-one responded. We all knew it was true! His one-liners always hit the bullseye. During an interval at the Cottesloe Theatre bar, discussing Geoffrey Archer’s libel case, Keith simply said: ‘Well, he’s only got to take his vest off to prove her wrong!’ (the prostitute whom Archer denied he had used said she recalled that his back was spotty). Incredibly, Keith finished a new play only days before his passing.

3 March
A moment of existential free fall: Sam2 and I were updating my website when I suddenly saw that I had, apparently, not published anything in the whole of 2023. It was difficult to believe, but research proved it. So what on earth was I doing? Did I do nothing that year?! This even deeper existential hole seemed to open beneath me…

An accurately cutaneous inspection of manuscripts showed that in fact I had written two stories that year, East of the Rhine and My First Communist, which were published, if that is the correct word, on this blog. From Spring 2023 to March 2024 I was merely researching the next story, which is a science fiction tale entitled ‘The Retiral of C.B.F. Warrington’. I then started writing it in April 2024, it grew and grew to 27,000 words, and I finished it only in November 2024. I will feature the first two chapters of this SF story here on Calderonia in April and May. But meanwhile, what of the book of short stories?

Well, Sam2 and I have recently had a business lunch at the Polish restaurant to discuss this matter:

The roast knuckle of pork, with of course Polish mustard and horseradish, a wee Bison Grass vodka and pint of unpasteurized beer, was more beautifully done than ever…

The upshot of this three-hour meeting is that I have a final story to write (I have started it and it should be only 6000 words long), whilst I proofread the typescripts of the other nineteen, and we intend starting the typesetting at the beginning of June. As is the way, the order of the stories has been completely changed four or five times and the two groups of stories reversed, so the book’s title now is White Bow/Ghoune.

I continue to read short stories by women. I’ve recently been reading and re-reading Helen Dunmore, Rose Tremaine and Lucy Caldwell. I know that I badly need to learn certain things from them for the final, ‘feminine’ story I’m writing, and I hope I have. But I’ve also become more and more convinced that I could never actually write normally like those women virtuosi as my brain isn’t wired that way… I mean it.

16 March
The disgraceful scene in the Oval Office on 28 February was quite obviously staged, i.e. prearranged, by Trump and Vance. It was an attempted ‘frame up’ of Zelensky — what’s known in Russian as a provokatsiia. Zelensky knows all about provokatsiias, as they are a stock in trade KGB technique, but why should he expect one from his own ally?

Zelensky quickly changed gear, and won hands down even though he was not speaking in his native language (making the effort to speak imperfect English was too respectful — he should always have an interpreter). He, the democratically elected president of the second largest country in Europe, crushed vice president Vance, but was entirely respectful in his argument and body language with president Trump. Zelensky even landed a blistering joke. When Trump told him ‘If you didn’t have our military equipment, this war would have been over in two weeks’, Zelensky countered: ‘In three days. I heard that from Putin: three days’ (meaning ‘Putin told us all himself that it was only going to take three days to conquer Ukraine’). This was the blackest humour and most devastating irony. It was completely over the heads of Trump and Vance. The whole episode was a nadir of American honour and intelligence.

We still do not know, of course, what conditions Trump and the Ukrainians are going to set Putin for peace, although we can be certain Putin will try not to keep them. Putin has lost the war and desperately needs peace, but he doesn’t want it. This conflict between manifest disaster (Russian casualties now approaching 900,000) and his psychotic determination to defeat and enslave Ukraine, could cost him his job, even life.

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

‘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

‘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.