Calderonia

Guest post by John Pym: Games Ancient and Modern

Posted on August 22, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Mr Beebe (Simon Callow) fights with an Edwardian tricycle at Foxwold in the 1985 film of A Room with a View. (Merchant Ivory Productions; Sarah Quill photographer)

An eight-minute video, La Roue, No. 29, in the series ‘Children’s Games’ by the artist Francis Alÿs: A barefoot boy in a green and yellow football shirt and red shorts – the colours of the Congo national football team – rolls an empty tyre up a huge slagheap. The heap, among the highest in the world, is composed of the fine waste from the Etoile copper mine on the outskirts of Lubumbashi in the Katanga region of southern Congo.

The boy fits himself inside the tyre and bowls down the slagheap. We see his calm smiling face from inside the tyre. At the bottom of the slagheap the tyre gently topples over and the boy stands up to be greeted by his friends who sing ‘The Mampala Etoile mine has been defeated. But Mampala, our great black mountain – we are pushing to find a solution!’ An internet search reveals that ‘Mampala’ is a Congolese football star, and that the great black mountain of waste contains sufficient cobalt to make that valuable material worth extracting – a heroic nickname and a possible solution.

I saw this remarkable video in the Belgian pavilion of the 2022 Venice Biennale.

Among the pencil-written letters my paternal grandfather Evey Pym sent to his wife Violet from France during the First World War was one that concerned a bicycle that Violet had recently acquired. Was the bicycle safe? She must take the greatest care. Violet – a close friend of the Calderons, Kittie in particular – no doubt simply intended to ride down the half-mile drive of Foxwold, the family home in Kent, and then along a peaceful country lane into the village of Brasted where almost all daily domestic needs could at that date be satisfied. The world was changing; women were asserting their independence.

What, I wondered sitting in the shade outside the Belgian pavilion, would Evey have made of that little African boy inside his tyre fearlessly descending the great back mountain?

Edwardian middle-class men may have worried about the safety of their wives riding bicycles – indeed we still worry today about everyone on bicycles – but they loved games and they would all, I’m sure, have raised their hats, my grandfather included, to that little boy and his tyre.

Foxwold in the 1880s/early 1890s, probably from a painting by Jane Hannah Backhouse Pym

Foxwold, in its heyday in the years before the First World War and up to 1927, the year when Violet died and Evey’s long widowhood began, was a home to games-playing. The Calderons undoubtedly played croquet on the fifth and most spacious of Foxwold’s six terraced lawns, as George was very keen on the game. The sides of the exacting croquet hoops were parallel, not wide angled and easy to pass through, and the house rules did not allow a player to place her foot on her ball and send an opponent’s ball decisively into the rhododendron bushes.

When I was a boy in the 1950s, and first knew Foxwold, we played croquet all the time from spring to autumn, as my own grandchildren do today with the same set of hoops and three of the same four chipped balls. I remember one of my grandmother Violet’s younger brothers, Roy Lubbock (b. 1892), a Cambridge don who taught engineering and had a hand in aircraft design during the First World War, smoking a cigarette in an amber holder and from his great height meticulously calculating through smoke and round spectacles the precise angle of strike.

Foxwold’s croquet set today

From the 1890s on, women and men, boys and girls, all played croquet together in mixed teams – with dogs sometimes contributing. Just as they shot arrows at straw targets and played field hockey, lacrosse, shuttlecock, bowls (each mahogany sphere identifiable by its countersunk dots, and impressively unmanageable to a small boy), deck quoits and clock golf – the ‘l’ was silent to the Edwardians, and indeed to my parents, both born in 1908.

The twelve-hole golf ‘course’ began on one of the lawns Kittie Calderon had laid out for Evey and Violet and then continued through the gap in a yew hedge, down steep banks and stone steps, and across rough chertstone paths. Each hole had a white-painted sunken iron circle and an appropriate Roman numeral, also white and made of iron, which was set in the grass nearby. When we played in the 50s and 60s the twine on the handles of the Edwardian (or perhaps Victorian) putters often came away in your hands.

Indoors we played Mahjong, again following our own rules, with a beautiful ivory-and-bamboo set perhaps brought back from China by one Sir Edmund Backhouse (b. 1873), a distant and enigmatic relative known as ‘The Hermit of Peking’. Card games were de rigueur in the evening, sometimes those forgotten French games of Bezique and Piquet (guidance available in a modern edition of Hoyle’s Rules), but more often Racing Demon and Hearts, and on quiet nights Clock Patience. I have my maternal grandmother’s fold-up card table with its dark brown velvet surface worn away in four patches where the ladies laid their cards – and I can see her now carefully playing Patience after tea with a small elegant pack of continental cards with some regal figure such as Marie Antoinette or Louis XVI decorating the back of the cards.

We played Up Jenkins – a sort of seated hide-and-seek – with a concealed 6d coin and hoots of hilarity as the hands of the lead player went ‘creepy-crawly’ across the table. There was also an exciting Edwardian horse-racing game with a huge green-baize cloth marked with all the jumps of the Grand National. This was a household in which, before the First World War, everyone rode and – before the advent of bicycles – most could drive a dog-cart to the village and to church services.

I remember the satisfying heaviness of the lead horses-and-riders going round the pretend Aintree course and the perils of all the jumps being expertly explained. My father Jack and his brother Roly rode their ponies to school through the woods and across a stream, unaccompanied, when they were quite small children. And my sister Carol has an oil painting by George’s brother Frank Calderon of ‘Master John Pym’ on one of his mounts. ‘It didn’t look like me or my horse,’ Jack said.

‘Master John Pym’ and his horse, by W. Frank Calderon, 1916 (Courtesy of Mrs Carol Taylor)

Hunting, on horseback and on foot, following the Beagles, was also a huge part of country middle-class Edwardian life. Rabbits existed to be shot (and eaten). The glass-fronted Foxwold gun cabinet, against which was stacked the games equipment, was locked, but a key was always left in the door. It was a source of fascination to me as a child. I unlocked the doors of the cabinet, examined the two double-barrelled shotguns and a hammer gun dating from the 19th century judged too old to be used.

Beneath the guns were two drawers full of loose cartridges of various weights of shot, rag pulls to clean the guns, tins of oil and several boxes of bullets – these were for a bolt-action .22 rifle which, after much pestering, I was eventually allowed to use for target practice on the croquet lawn. My mother, whose father had been killed by a ricochet bullet in 1915, instructed me in the rudiments of gun safety – and then, as I remember it, I was just sent down the garden with a lethal weapon and box of bullets, aged – what? – twelve or thirteen. Was this attitude a legacy of the Edwardians? Of an era when ‘health and safety’ was an issue not yet invented?

In the summer of 1985, the American director James Ivory arrived in London to film the English portion of Ruth Jhabvala’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View, first published in 1908. He needed an Edwardian house set in the Surrey hills. This would be transformed into ‘Windy Corner’, the home of the widowed Mrs Honeychurch and her daughter Lucy, for whom at the end of the film the whole world will open up – and the riding of bicycles would, along with much else, no longer be an issue.

Foxwold, situated a few miles from Surrey, on a ridge of green sandstone, fitted the bill. Those who have seen the film will certainly remember the woodland scene in which Lucy’s irrepressible brother Freddy, the deceptively somnolent George Emerson and the wonderfully encouraging clergyman Mr Beebe throw off their clothes – and every vestige of Victorian propriety – and leap into ‘The Sacred Lake’, and behave like exuberant boys in a paddling pool on an endless summer afternoon.

Watercolour by Roland Pym of the ‘Sacred Lake’ scene in A Room with a View, made during the shooting of the film at Foxwold, 1985. The names underneath refer (left to right) to the actors playing Freddy, George Emerson, Cecil, Lucy, and Mrs Honeychurch, with soundman Ray Beckett. (Courtesy of the Estate of Roland Pym)

On the old Foxwold croquet lawn, with its narrow approach steps on which George Emerson takes Lucy in his arms and bestows on her a second passionate kiss, the director recreated another moment of Edwardian playfulness – a game of ‘bumble puppy’ in which two players bat a tennis ball, attached by string to a post, back and forth and round and round. Bumble puppy was not in fact, as far as I can recall, one of the games I discovered beside the gun cabinet. But there it is, in a classic movie representing the Edwardian age and standing in for all those other games that George and Kittie and their friends and family so happily played in the years before Europe erupted in August 1914.

Minnie Beebe (Mia Fothergill) playing bumble puppy in the film of A Room with a View (Merchant Ivory Productions, 1985)

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 Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Children's Games', A Room with a View, bicycles, Brasted, Brigadier-General Sir John Gough V.C., bumble puppy, card games, Carol Taylor, croquet, E.M. Forster, Etoile copper mine, Evey Pym, Foxwold, Francis Alÿs, Frank Calderon, games, George Calderon, golf, gun cabinet, guns, horses, Hoyle's Rules, Jack Pym, James Ivory, John Pym, Kittie Calderon, La Roue, Lubumbashi, Mahjong, Mampala, Merchant Ivory Productions, Mia Fothergill, Minnie Beebe, play, riding, Roland Pym, Roya Lubbock, Ruth Jhabvala, shooting, Simon Callow, Sir Edmund Backhouse, The Congo, The Great War, The Sacred Lake, tricycle, Up Jenkins, Venice Biennale, Violet Pym, Windy Corner, World War I | 1 Comment

Mayakovsky’s pancake

Posted on August 15, 2022 by Patrick Miles

It may seem surprising that I can bring myself to say anything positive about Russians at a time when their country has become, to quote Joseph Conrad again, ‘the negation of everything worth living for’. But, of course, these four short videos are inspired by one of the most positive Russians who ever lived, Anton Chekhov, who happened also to believe deeply in democracy. Russians’ love of creating and telling anecdotes is a very engaging trait, but in the Soviet era the endless production of so-called political anecdotes became for many merely a way of avoiding real political belief, integrity and engagement.

I fluffed this video at the end of the quotation from pages 1-2 of my Chekhov biography because I suddenly thought I should change ‘Suvorin’, who most listeners would not have heard of, to ‘his [Chekhov’s] publisher’. One should never make these snap decisions! For your interest, here is the whole passage as it appears in the book:

Once, when he was still a schoolboy, […] somewhere in the steppe, Anton Pavlovich was standing by a deserted well, looking down at his reflection in the water, when a girl of about fifteen came up to draw water, and so charmed the future writer that there, in the steppe, he began to embrace her and kiss her, and then they stood together at the well a long time, in silence, staring down at their two reflections. He did not want to leave her, and she had forgotten all about her water. He told Suvorin this once, when they were talking about lives being like parallel lines, whether they can ever meet, and love at first sight.

Aleksei Sergeevich Suvorin (1834-1912) was a journalist, newspaper owner and book publisher who was a close friend of Chekhov’s until their differences in 1898 over the Dreyfus Affair (see chapter 11 of Anton Chekhov: A Short 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.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Aleksei Suvorin, Alfred Dreyfus, anecdotes, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov: A Short Life, biographies, comments, Dreyfus Affair, Lev Trotsky, literary anecdotes, Literature and Revolution, love, love at first sight, Mikhail Pavlovich Chekhov, Narkom, pancakes, parallel lines, People's Commissar, proverbs, Shrove Tuesday, Shrovetide, steppe, Vladimir Mayakovsky | Leave a comment

Guest post by Alison Miles: Edwardian grandmothers?

Posted on August 1, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Both my grandmothers were children during the reign of Edward VII. My paternal grandmother Dorothy Mabel Angus (Granny Thomas) was born on 2 December 1897 and my maternal grandmother Eleanor Frances Ashton (Granny Goodfield) on 7 April 1898. Granny Thomas was the youngest of six and Granny Goodfield was the second of five.

We have many photos from immediate family to large gatherings. This small family group is the Angus family with Granny Thomas front right leaning against her father’s knee.

The photo below is the Ashtons with Granny Goodfield in the second row from the back, fourth from the left, with long wavy hair tied with bows.

I think both photos were probably taken in the first 10 years of the twentieth century. At the time younger boys wore Eton collars for these formal occasions while little girls and very small boys wore dresses, often white. The older girls and women wore long skirts and high necked blouses with loose fitting bodices.

The big question is, were my grandmothers Edwardians in their outlook and values? Both grandmothers had experienced Edwardian childhood and many of their aspirations and expectations reflected that time.

They both came from families that valued education. John Mortimer Angus had an academic/university career and David Ashton was a schoolmaster/headmaster. My grandmothers went to school until their late teens, where they won prizes, and then on to university. By that stage they both lived in Cardiff and were undergraduates at Cardiff University; Granny Thomas was a modern linguist and Granny Goodfield a scientist. They vaguely remembered each other and I recall Granny Thomas (who was conscious of her more robust figure) saying how glamorous Granny Goodfield was, as a very slim, almost elfin, young woman.

They both suffered the loss of a brother. Granny Thomas’s brother Norman Angus was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917 aged 27, which apparently contributed to her leaving university before graduating and in 1920 marrying my grandfather, David Arnold Thomas. Granny Goodfield’s young brother David Ashton died aged 10 or so soon after the end of WW1; we thought it was Spanish Flu but later discovered he died of meningitis.

Did ‘Edwardian’ mean anything to me as a child? Not really, but I remember what my grandmothers had in their houses and talked about, as well as their social expectations.

Granny Thomas’s style of home was strongly influenced by Edwardian traditions as well as the architectural movements of the time. Her furniture was oak and mahogany, including tallboys, wardrobes and chests of drawers. There were glass fronted bookcases and my grandfather had a roll top desk, all Edwardian in style.

Overall the feel was substantial and heavy, ideal for their relatively large house.

The house that I remember most clearly was 1 Llandennis Avenue that my Thomas grandparents had built for them in the 1930s, to a design of my grandmother’s, with features reflecting the impact of the Arts and Crafts movement. As you approached the front door there was a solid porch — a very Edwardian feature — and you stepped into a spacious hall with a well-proportioned staircase that took you up to a landing/balcony.

As a very small child I remember visiting Great-Granny Ashton (seated front left in the Ashton family photo above), my Granny Goodfield’s mother, an old lady in a long black dress sitting in a room fairly full of traditional dark furniture, probably more Victorian than Edwardian. I sat on a child’s chair that we now have, shown below (only 25 inches from floor to the top of the back and rather the worse for wear – not surprisingly as it is over 100 years old).

Granny Goodfield’s houses were also full of furniture but they seemed light and airy by comparison. She had gate-legged tables that could fold up easily, comfortable chairs, and plenty of things such as old plates on display (often riveted together where they had broken) and books everywhere.

This table is one that I have inherited.

She also liked cushions, rugs and shawls, so there was a ‘draped’ feel to the soft furnishings. In retrospect she was on the ‘Arts and Crafts’ side, informal and creative.

At the time that my grandmothers were children the British Empire was in full swing. With present-day awareness of outcomes of occupation by a foreign power, it is easy to forget how people thought at the time about the empire. There was pride in the economic, political and administrative changes the British achieved overseas as well as employment opportunities and infrastructure, education and health improvements for the local populations. It was normal to have family and friends working abroad as part of the British establishment. Granny Thomas had family in administrative and teaching jobs in countries in Africa, and two generations (great-great-aunts born in the mid-19^th century and great-uncles and cousins born 30 or so years later) were Baptist missionaries in India. A large number of British households had souvenirs, ornaments and furniture from ‘the colonies’ as they were known at the time. I remember a resonant elephant bell that was fun to ring and an Indian brass table/tray that stood on a folding stand. We also have several inherited small ebony elephants as well as a slightly wobbly bedside table of Indian origin.

My educated grandmothers would have thought of themselves as middle class. The social strata of their childhoods were fairly rigid and although everyone knew education was a way to achieve what you wanted (social mobility), it was not always available. My grandfather Goodfield, however, was an excellent example of someone who achieved great things through education after a rural childhood and a spell as a miner in South Wales, studying in the evenings before WW1, then being sponsored to go to theological college.

Both my grandmothers had ingrained views about people’s place in society. By today’s standards they made inappropriate comments about people, e.g. always wanting to know ‘what his/her father does’, and ‘how they made their money’. Those were the days when RP (Received Pronunciation) was an indicator of status; speaking with a regional accent doomed you to the lower classes. They both expected to have help in the house, as would have been the norm for Edwardian households with working class servants. Although Granny Thomas was relatively ‘hands on’ (I remember her cooking, and ‘bustling about’ as she called it, when we stayed), she had a nanny for her children as well as domestic help and a gardener. From the 1940s until she died in the early 80s it was clear that Granny Goodfield was very keen on someone else doing housework etc for her, mainly her children when they were young and later.

Continuing the social theme, an aspect of the middle classes in the early years of the twentieth century was that they always aimed to ‘keep standards up’ and do things that ensured everyone realised you ‘knew what’s what’ and associated with the right people. What now seem totally unnecessary rules were part of keeping society ‘as it should be’ and woe betide anyone who made even the smallest mistake. This was the background to many of the values and expected behaviours that my grandmothers adhered to. Granny Goodfield refused to visit me in my first property, a late nineteenth-century improved two-up, two-down terraced house in Cambridge, because she said it was where families with children who had no shoes lived!

Both grandmothers demonstrated the cultural background of their Edwardian childhoods when it was normal to learn musical instruments and to draw and paint. Granny Goodfield was a very good pianist but she preferred to play Beethoven and Schubert sonatas, so we did not spend much time round the piano singing children’s songs with her in the authentic Edwardian manner. In Granny Thomas’s house there were always books, paper and crayons, and games and toys, from croquet and clock golf to card games and bagatelle, which were good fun for all ages.

So were my grandmothers Edwardians? Do these reminiscences answer the question?

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 character, Edwardian English, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Africa, Arras, Arts and Crafts, Ashton Family, Battle of Arras, British Empire, Cardiff, Cardiff University, class system, comments, David Ashotn, Dorothy Mabel Angus, education, Edwardian furnishings, Edwardian furniture, Edwardian homes, Edwardian period, Eleanor Frances Ashton, family photographs, Franz Schubert, grandparents, housework, India, John Mortimer Angus, Ludwig van Beethoven, meningitis, missionaries, music-making, nannies, Norman Angus, Received Pronunciation, servants, snobbery, social mobility, social status, souvenirs, The Great War, Thomas Family, Victorian period, World War I | Leave a comment

‘Chekhov’s Gun’ (Concluded)

Posted on July 25, 2022 by Patrick Miles

In this concluding video on the subject of Chekhov’s Gun, I give a thumbnail sketch of its application in his own plays from Ivanov (1887) to The Cherry Orchard (1904). Since the phrase is so popular (yes, really, I have ascertained that), I confidently expect these dry factual videos to go viral amongst young people and lead to thousands of new sales.

There is certainly an affinity between Chekhov’s Gun and, in the film industry, a MacGuffin, but there are vital differences, which I may perhaps leave to Mr John Pym, our resident film crtitic, to elucidate better than I can. At the end of the day, the origins of these two ‘dramatic principles’ seem equally obscure!

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 Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, bee-brooch, biographies, biography, breaking string, chaos theory, Chekhov's Gun, Chekhovian, comments, commercial theatre, contingency, cucumber, fortuitousness, galoshes, Ivanov, MacGuffin, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, The Wood Demon, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya | 1 Comment

The Isle of Wight Entente of 1909

Posted on July 18, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

If there is one book that I wish I had been able to read when I was researching my biography of George Calderon, it is the one above, published last year.

A quarter of it (pp. 231-336) deals with the visit by Nicholas II and his immediate family to Britain, more precisely the Isle of Wight and its Roads, in August 1909. Stephan Roman examines it in meticulous detail, even devoting a chapter to each day that the imperial yacht was anchored there with its Russian naval escort, Edward VII’s own yacht, and the entire British fleet off Spithead. This visit created such a public furore and interest in Russia that I am willing to believe that up in Hampstead it persuaded theatre manager Alfred Wareing and George Calderon that now was the time to launch the first production of a play by Chekhov in Britain, George’s translation of The Seagull three months later at Glasgow Repertory Theatre. Yet I completely overlooked the Tsar’s visit!

The event exemplifies Edward VII’s ‘facilitatory’ role in European diplomacy before 1914. British Socialists and Liberals, as well as the numerous Russian political exiles, bitterly opposed the tsar’s visit. In Parliament, the leader of the Labour Party, Arthur Henderson, excoriated the autocracy’s human rights record and demanded the Liberal government withdraw the invitation. But it had already been decided that this would be not a state visit, but a family visit by a nephew to his uncle (Edward VII), hence the invitation was not to visit London, but the Isle of Wight…which, conveniently, had been both the British royal family’s playground and ‘the apex of an imperial world’ (p. 19) since Queen Victoria and Prince Albert arrived there in 1844 and rebuilt Osborne House. So whilst the King hosted the visit, the British prime minister, foreign secretary and other prominent figures travelled down to the Isle of Wight to conduct their political business.

The ‘business’ was nothing less than to seal a long-prepared alliance with Russia and France which might deter German expansionism. On the outbreak of war, this ‘Triple Entente’ became a military alliance. So the ‘family visit’ was fantastically important, even though the public did not understand it at the time. The British press went mad with articles about Russian fashion, home life and cooking, ‘there was an equal interest in the […] culture of Russians’ (p. 267), and crowds flocked to the Isle of Wight for a glimpse of the Tsar, his enigmatic wife and their ‘lovely girls’ as William Gerhardie described them (they are now strastoterptsy, a special class of Russian Orthodox saints). It seems pretty clear that it was this stellar media event that led to the British ‘Russia mania’ which is conventionally attributed to the 1911 visit by Ballets Russes, and that the latter was an effect not cause. Like it or not, Russia was now our ally.

This blockbuster is really four stories, each of them absorbingly told. First we have the history of Russian royal visits to Britain and the Isle of Wight since Peter the Great’s visitation of Deptford in 1698. Here, for me, the revelation was how many future tsars had lived in Britain before a single British monarch or Prince of Wales travelled to Russia (in 1994). Then there is Nicholas II’s 1909 visit. This moves seamlessly into the story of the rest of his reign and the tragedy at Ekaterinburg on 17 July 1918. Finally, there is the enclosing story of Stephan Roman’s grandparents’ terrifying escape from the Cheka to Romania in 1922; the whole work is quite rightly dedicated to their memory and ‘the millions of Russians who […] were destroyed by the collapse of the Romanov dynasty’ (p. 392). At a time when an understanding of the longue durée of Russo-British relations could hardly be more relevant and instructive, I thoroughly recommend this book as your holiday reading.

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 character, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Alfred Wareing, Alix of Hesse, Anglo-British relations, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Hendesron, biographies, Britain and the Isle of Wight, Cheka, comments, Deptford, Edward VII, Ekaterinburg, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Glasgow Repertory Theatre, H.H. Asquith, holiday reading, Isle and Empires: Romanov Russia, Isle of Wight, Nicholas II, Osborne House, Peter the Great, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria, Romania, Russo-British relations, Sir Edward Grey, Spithead, Stephan Roman, stratsoterptsy, The Great War, The Seagull, Triple Entente, William Gerhardie, World War I | Leave a comment

‘Chekhov’s Gun’ (To be continued)

Posted on July 11, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Sam2 has persuaded me to make four short videos about my recently published short biography of Chekhov and my ra-ther longer 2018 biography of George Calderon. I am completely new to the genre, therefore you should not expect a slick performance, but the videos have the virtue of brevity and I do try to say something!

This video needed several takes, and then a fortnight later I realised I had got something slightly wrong… I say in it that the two quotes from Chekhov about his gun come from 1889 and 1890 respectively. Actually, they both come from 1889, which perhaps bolsters my theory that Chekhov picked the phrase up at the time of Ivanov (1887-89).

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, Anton Chekhov: A Short Life, biographies, biography, Chekhov's Gun, comments, dramatic principles, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Ivanov, Moscow Art Theatre, Moscow Arts, Sam2, The Seagull, videos, Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko, Wikipedia | Leave a comment

How would I write it now?

Posted on June 30, 2022 by Patrick Miles

An author considers his own book.

Many authors never re-read their own books. One can understand why. Some must feel that it’s not necessary as it can’t change anything (unless the book is about to have an ‘improved’ edition). Others, like George Orwell apparently, simply don’t want to. They see themselves as having completed the book and moved on. The very process of writing the book has changed them, so they will inevitably be seeing their work with different eyes, and they don’t want that fuzzy experience, that time-wobble if you like. What’s the point?

I have dipped with increasing regularity into George Calderon: Edwardian Genius since it was published in 2018, in order to check facts in it that I could no longer remember, but I have only just re-read it in its entirety. I’m glad I left it until now, as four years after publication the book genuinely seems as though it was written by someone else!

Whereas in 2018 I proofread it too fast because it was still so fresh in my memory (and therefore missed egregious errors and typos), this time I could manage only about 70 pages a day. I could not read it fast, I had to read slowly and take in every word. However, I’m glad to say this wasn’t hard work, I wanted to keep reading it, and I was more impressed than I was expecting. But after each 70 pages, I was still amazed at how many pages there were left. There’s no getting round it, it’s a long book! Readers will chuckle: they know this, yet I hadn’t really grasped it.

Naturally, if I could write the book now I would be able to tell readers exactly who Professor Rose and Mrs Shapta were, which would be significant additions, and I would have to devote pages to an examination of the manuscript of George’s and William Caine’s 1914 pantomime The Brave Little Tailor, which came to light in the last stages of writing my book. This could reveal a lot about George’s perception of Time. I think I would also, with the help of the best college historian in Oxford, delve more deeply into George’s undergraduate life there, as I have become more aware of the importance of Oxford networks in his political and theatrical lives. I would explore his love of mathematics more, as well as his surprising interest in ‘nature’ and his pathways deep into Edwardian journalism. I might well be tempted to introduce footnotes, as (like some reviewers) I found it annoying at times that no specific archival or bibliographic reference was given and I could no longer remember some sources myself…

Above all, if I were writing the book now I think I would slim it by at least a third. I was surprised by how long it takes to get to George’s birth (p. 95) and how many pages there still are after his death (fifty-two). I would contemplate cutting everything about Earlham and Kittie’s relationships before meeting George, and everything about the rest of Kittie’s life after she had secured his literary legacy in 1924. Perhaps I was over-influenced by the fact that my predecessor, Percy Lubbock, had begun his George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory with Earlham and Kittie’s first marriage? Perhaps I was subconsciously drawn into telling the whole of Kittie’s life post-George by the discovery that she died on my second birthday, i.e. inside my own life, and knew local Kentish figures, very likely my own great-aunt and great-uncle at Ashford?

But I was a very different person when I wrote the book between 2011 and 2018. George and Kittie previously had no public profile, I had discovered their entire extant archive, and I think it’s understandable that I wanted to get everything in because they might never have another chance. Also, I was gripped by the excitement of discovering their lives in greater and greater detail; so I wanted to tell their story rather than write an academic biography. And I wanted to explore Edwardian Life and contrast it with Victorian Life, which meant a more expansive approach embracing Earlham and the Corbet family. I now find it unsettling and disconcerting that the ‘present’ of the War takes over on p. 367 as though the book were a novel, but again it was what I wanted in that great centenary. Today I might say the book was ‘too ambitious’… Equally, however, I see more clearly than before that it could never have been comparably produced by a commercial publisher, and I feel completely vindicated in having brought it out myself.

One day, fifty or a hundred years hence, a shorter, more honed, very differently focussed, more deeply considered biography of George Calderon will be written (i.e. not of George and Kittie together). Because I used no footnotes, the author will have to research the primary sources from scratch at the Houghton Library, Harvard, which I think will be healthy. I am sure she will make a very good job of it, and find a commercial publisher.

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 character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged 'real time', Archie Ripley, Ashford, biographies, biography, Clare Hopkins, commemoration, comments, Corbet family, Earlham, future biographer, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Gerge Orwell, Harvard University, Houghton Library, Kent, Kittie Calderon, Mrs Shapta, Nina Corbet, Percy Lubbock, Professor Rose, publishers, Sam&Sam, The Brave Little Tailor, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, William Caine, World War I, Ypres | Leave a comment

Man of sorrows

Posted on June 20, 2022 by Patrick Miles

I was not planning or expecting to write this, but I feel I must, whether I prove right or wrong, because we all ought to be aware that the Russo-Ukrainian War is now at a critical point. It is the most deeply dangerous moment for both Ukraine and its president.

As I write, despite all prognostications and the Ukrainians’ lack of some even basic military equipment, the Russians still have not taken Severo-Donetsk. The Ukrainian resistance, fighting block by block, has been incredible. One is tempted to say that it amounts to a victory even if it is only producing attritional stalemate. But the key factor in the eastern region is the Russians’ heavy artillery and missile bombardment. They intend simply to destroy everything in front of them, as in Chechnia and Syria, then move forwards. The Ukrainians are outgunned, they are losing up to 200 soldiers a day, and the Russian force is at least seven times larger.

The US European Command’s ‘International Donation Coordination Centre’ in Stuttgart is efficient and working day and night to supply the Ukrainians with the heavy weapons and medium-range missiles that are vital to stem the Russian advance. But can they, or anyone else, do this fast enough? As the leading military figures in this logistical operation constantly stress, the issue is balanced on a knife edge. Zelensky’s increasingly desperate appeals for western weapons say it all.

But his and his people’s determination to drive the invader out, i.e. to win, is also being threatened from another quarter. The world’s media are beginning to suffer from war-fatigue. A reputable Berlin-based poll of European public opinion shows a clear majority (35% against 23%) in favour of, quote, ‘Europe seeking to end the war as soon as possible, even if it means Ukraine making concessions’, which can only mean recognising Russian illegal seizure of Crimea and Donbas. By ‘Europe’ is meant mainly the EU, which it so happens Ukraine has long wanted to join. Last week the de facto leaders of the EU, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and Mario Draghi, were in Kyiv ostensibly supporting Zelensky (although Scholz in particular has delivered very little military aid so far). Shortly afterwards, the EU announced it had given Ukraine its long desired ‘candidate’ status for joining the EU. Like ‘European Public Opinion’, these EU leaders favour an ‘end to the war as soon as possible’. Even the Pope believes the war is partly NATO’s fault. It is only pragmatic to assume, therefore, that Zelensky and his government were under pressure to ‘make peace’ in exchange for EU membership.

This would be a disaster for Zelensky, even if (which seems unlikely) it were approved in the referendum he has always said would have to be held on a deal with the Russians. It is difficult to see how he and his followers could politically survive an EU-sponsored ‘peace’. But if we don’t give the Ukrainians the arms to do what they actually want to do — defeat Russia — what alternative would they have? ‘Europe’ would have coerced them into it and destroyed a political leader head and shoulders above all of them.

What ‘Europe’ does not seem to realise (or does it?) is that such a peace deal could only be an Armistice until Putin was militarily ready to break it. On that occasion he would undoubtedly attempt a successful direct assault on Kyiv, as his avowed object has always been to turn the country into a vassal state like Belorussia. It would in effect be an ‘appeasement deal’. Putin does not do peace any more than Adolf Hitler did. A ‘peace deal’ with Putin would solve absolutely nothing, unless NATO used the breathing space to arm Ukraine so effectively that it could win the war in the second round. But does the West have the will to do that? Many wise, experienced British commentators fear that it doesn’t and that the EU and NATO are going to sell Ukraine out.

You see why I think we are at a terrible moment.

It is quite possible that Putin will propose making ‘peace’ if/when Donbas is taken, and that EU leaders will fall for it, splitting the EU, NATO and the West.

I fear that the only way for Ukraine to win is for the West to play and beat Putin at his own game of ‘special military operations’, i.e. for several sovereign states (the UK, France, Poland, Germany?) to join Ukraine in the field. We would not be ‘at war’ with Russia, you understand; it would just be a ‘special military operation’ to defend another European democracy…

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 Armistice, artillery, Belorussia, betrayal, Chechnia, democracy, Emmanuel Macron, EU, France, Great Britain, Kiev, Mario Draghi, military strategy, missiles, NATO, Olaf Scholz, peace, peace deals, peace talks, petards, Poland, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Severodonetsk, special military operations, Syria, UK, Ukraine, United States of America, USA, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky, war | Leave a comment

No place like Home

Posted on June 11, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Click the image to find this book on the publisher’s website.

Ukrainian literature is flourishing, even or especially as the war rages. Perhaps this will not surprise you, as whenever we see and hear Ukrainians on our televisions they are lively, articulate, cultured, witty, open to the world and dialogue, which I’m afraid one can’t usually say of their Russian counterparts. The novel The Children of Grad, just published in a translation by Michael Pursglove and Natalia Pniushkova, is the only contemporary Ukrainian novel I have read, but I must say it’s a masterpiece of freshness, realism, psychology, ethical focus, folklore, and even political allegory.

It opens in 1994, three years after Ukraine became independent. Four children between the ages of eleven and fourteen abscond from a boarding school/orphanage basically because it is still a Soviet institution, where they are particularly terrorised by the Communist native Russian-language teacher. They are led by the eldest child, Slavik, to ‘Grad’ (‘The City’), which is to be the Utopia where they will be happy and free from adults. Their journey to Grad involves them in vivid adventures.

So far, so Huckleberry Finn. Grad, however, turns out to be a remote, tumbledown farmstead with no mod cons. The children have to evade detection, they steal from villages, attempt to grow food, fall ill, and argue. One of them is a Crimean Tatar, Akim, who turns to drink when Slavik ‘marries’ his eleven-year-old sister. She becomes pregnant and dies. The narrator is torn between his gang-loyalty to Slavik and his awareness of Christian morality. Akim is accidentally killed in a fight with Slavik. To conceal the death, Slavik burns Grad down with Akim’s corpse in it. Slavik and the narrator, Vitka, then go on the run again, ‘to find our own, real Grad’ as Slavik puts it, but he dies of injury in a snowstorm, after confessing to an earlier murder. The Children of Grad is more Lord of the Flies and Dostoevskii, than Mark Twain.

The novel’s finale, though, is both fine and unromantically hopeful. Towards the end of his time at Grad, the narrator had wanted more and more to go ‘home’, either to the original boarding school (where the headmistress and the beautiful Ukrainian-language teacher Fauna were good people), or to his dysfunctional parents; but he had been too afraid of Slavik to say so. After Slavik’s death, Vitka is saved from suicide by an officer-veteran of the Afghan war, Daddy Misha, who adopts him and gives him a new, happy life. But ‘for many years I dreamed at night of Grad’. When Vitka is over thirty (i.e. in about 2015) he revisits the ruins of Grad. On its wall he scratches his unspoken wish of long ago: ‘I want to go back home’. These are the last words of the novel. Such is its multi-contextuality that ‘home’ could mean his home town, parents who really parent, the Grey Willow Boarding School, his home with Daddy Misha, or a greater Home — Ukraine itself.

This is a gripping, provocative, eviscerating, at times deeply poetic work; a remarkable achievement by Maria Miniailo and the translators that I commend strongly to Calderonia’s followers who wish to know Ukraine.

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 comments, Crimean Tatars, dystopias, Fedor Dostoevskii, folklore, Huckleberry Finn, Lord of the Flies, Maria Miniailo, Michael Pursglove, Natalia Pniushkova, novels, political allegory, realism, Russo-Afghan War, The Children of Grad, The Russo-Ukrainian War, Ukraine, Ukrainian literature, Utopias, Waterloo Fiction, William Golding | Leave a comment

The Edwardian Re-turn

Posted on June 4, 2022 by Patrick Miles

I hope you will forgive my pun on the title of one of the seminal works about the Edwaaaardian (as they pronounced it) era, Samuel Hynes’s The Edwardian Turn of Mind.

A hundred and seven years ago today, at just after noon, George Calderon was killed in the Third Battle of Krithia. One day in the future, I imagine, DNA will enable forensic scientists to say which of the 2226 graves of unidentified servicemen at Twelve Tree Copse Cemetery on the Gallipoli Peninsula contains George’s remains.

I shall observe a two-minute silence and raise a glass today in George’s memory and to honour his self-sacrifice in the war against Kaiser Wilhelm II’s demented project of a Greater Germany — a self-sacrifice that robbed the British theatre of such a promising playwright and nearly destroyed his wife Kittie.

It was a slightly unnerving coincidence to receive the copies of my biography George Calderon: Edwardian Genius from Clays, the printers, at just after noon on 4 June 2018. Sam&Sam now have 131 copies left, and are about to embark on what may be our last marketing surge to reduce that number to a core which will only be sold at their full retail price of £30. Thirty were earmarked for Russianists at the 2022 BASEES Conference, which we could not attend because of the invasion of Ukraine, but I would be happy to offer those to followers of Calderonia with the same discount, i.e. priced at £20. We also have left nine pristine copies with their original claret bellyband and bookmark as from the printer on 4 June 2018. Judging from Antiques Roadshow, I should price these copies now at £50. If you would like to buy copies at these two prices, please contact me at mail@patrickmiles.co.uk. Postage will be free.

For a variety of reasons, it seems appropriate to return for a few months to the original Edwardian theme of Calderonia. I haven’t read my biography from cover to cover since 2018, so I shall do that (with trepidation) and my reactions will form the subject of our first Edwardian Return post. There will also be guest posts, and the series will be interrupted from time to time to comment on the war and other issues.

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 character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged Antiques Roadshow, BASEES Conference, bellybands, biography, bookmarks, Clays Ltd, Dardanelles, DNA, Edwardian Return, Gallipoli, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Greater Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Kittie Calderon, Russo-Ukrainian War, Samuel Hynes, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Ukraine, World War I | Leave a comment

Very Old Cambridge Tales: 2

Posted on May 28, 2022 by Patrick Miles

SNAPSHOTS OF CAMBRIDGE

‘Ron Shakespeare’, a casual at the Arts, was so plastered the other evening that he actually got caught on stage at the end of a scene-change. The Stage Manager did his nut and threatened this time to fire him.

‘All right, all right – but first you give me an appearance fee!’ quipped ‘Ron’.

* * *

The other day, just after the April snow, I was accosted by a burly American girl with a pair of opera glasses round her neck, who was wandering along the Backs looking for the Bird Sanctuary.

‘You know, the most amazing thing,’ she said, is there don’t seem to be any hummingbirds here…’

* * *

A certain lecturer in moral philosophy was so liberal that when served by the nice Nigerian girl in the University Library tea-room, he couldn’t bring himself to ask for a ‘white’ coffee.

* * *

I called on old Addley and was relieved to discover that he had been able to resume his dissertation on William Gerhardie. Some chrysalids, which appeared all over his box-files and card-indexes when caterpillars crept in through his open windows last September, had hatched in the recent warm weather and the butterflies flown away.

* * *

Tucked away in a dank corner of our College gardens, I discovered a small dry-stone wall. It seemed to serve absolutely no purpose, so I asked an Adam who was tilling a flower-bed nearby, what it was doing there.

‘Those are pieces of boys’ hearts, sir,’ he replied with a wag of his head. ‘We keep finding them all round the College, now that the Women are up.’

* * *

The General Election. Dr M., Master of X., wanted to put up a VOTE LABOUR board on a tree overhanging the pavement from his garden. Appropriately enough, he rang up the Junior Bursar to send round a workman.

* * *

I was in Gallyon’s poring over a case-full of spinners. One of those Trinity toffs came in – cavalry twills, Viyella shirt, cheese-cutter – strode up to the counter, and quacked: ‘I want a dozen No. 8 hooks and a ton of shit! Er, I mean a tin of…’

KULYGIN

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 anecdotes, Arts Theatre, Bird Sanctuary, butterflies, Cambridge, Cambridge colleges, Cambridge Tales, Cambridge University Library, dry-stone walls, fishing tackle, Gallyon's, gardeners, General Election, hummingbirds, Junior Bursar, Labour Party, liberalism, moral philosophy, Nigeria, Ron Shakespeare, snapshots, Trinity College, United States of America, William Gerhardie | Leave a comment

Very Old Cambridge Tales: 1

Posted on May 23, 2022 by Patrick Miles

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF GRANTA

POEM:

Horror

The Studio,
Fowlmere.
4.11.67

Dear Sir,

Many of your readers will be aware of the present popularity of Concrete Poetry.

We Concrete Poets aim at expression by emphasizing the meaninglessness of the words we use.

Poetry today should be as much a part of one’s normal life as lavatory paper or cornflakes, and we therefore treat words as expendable, consumable commodities like these. The days when words had associations are over. We can no longer speak of the ‘meaning’ of a word in a poem, only its independent, abstract presence.

We arrange words in such a way that, if you had not ‘read’ them first, you would be able to tell what they were trying to say by the configuration they are set in. This is much more demanding than mere reading.

Thus a spectator at a concrete poem might spend several hours, or even a day or two, if he has the patience, contemplating such a poem, whereas with most previous poetry it took far less to understand the poet. This is one of the advances we must credit Concrete Poetry with.

I offer above one of my latest word sculptures, which you may like to print along with this letter to show those of your readers unacquainted as yet with CP that there is ‘something in it’. In all modesty, in this poem I believe you will perceive a synthesis of form and ‘meaning’ scarcely excelled by Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, or Eliot.

The vast, empty spaces of white within and outside the poem, and its complete, endless form, articulate an absolute and perfect expression of the isolation of horror, and by extension the poem is the ultimate existential expression of Man’s loneliness in the face of the Universe.

Moreover, the longer you contemplate the poem (which I believe may be the shortest ever penned), the more revelationary and ‘meaningful’ it becomes. This is not to mention a possible Freudian interpretation.

Yours sincerely,

ERWIN J. BUNTHORPE

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 Cambridge Tales, concrete poetry, cornflakes, Erwin J. Bunthorpe, Granta, Homer, John Keats, John Milton, lavatory paper, parodies, sculpture, Sigmund Freud, T.S. Eliot, Virgil, William Shakespeare | Leave a comment

A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 5

Posted on May 17, 2022 by Patrick Miles

7 May 2022
People are, I know, frightened by Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons. I have suggested that even western leaders have been sufficiently frightened by these threats to be militarily unproactive. This means that Putin doesn’t need to use nuclear weapons, it’s enough to possess them and threaten to use them. However, the massive joint Finnish-British-American-Estonian-Latvian military exercises in SW Finland last week seem to have very effectively shut him up on the subject. This must prove something.

Would Putin use nuclear weapons, whether tactical or not? A spokesman for Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday that ‘Russia firmly abides by the principle that there can be no victors in a nuclear war and it must not be unleashed’. That’s clear, then. Not quite. He added: ‘Russia must be ready for any provocations whatsoever from Ukraine and the West’, which surely means ‘ready with nuclear weapons to respond to nuclear provocations’. But ‘nuclear provocations’ have so far come only from the Russian side…

9 May
At the beginning of the war, Boris Yel’tsin’s daughter came out against it, prominent figures resigned from their state posts, hundreds of Orthodox priests signed a petition against it, thousands went on the streets to demonstrate against it, other thousands (including high-ups like economist Anatolii Chubais) simply left Russia in protest. But why didn’t Mikhail Gorbachev publicly express his opinion about it?

I have heard no explanation of this. Gorbachev is now ninety-one and quite frail, but he has always been such a great talker that my guess is he is gagged by some deal that Putin set up, with threats, years ago. In 2016 Gorbachev said he approved of Putin’s annexation of Crimea and would have done the same himself. He hasn’t come out and said this of the Russo-Ukrainian War, so perhaps he actually opposes it.

Curiously enough, Gorbachev may have made an extremely significant intervention just before the invasion was launched. His interpreter and now associate in the Gorbachev Foundation, Pavel Palazhchenko, stated, contrary to Putin’s then narrative, that western leaders in talks with Gorbachev in 1990 made no promises regarding NATO expansion into Poland, Czechoslavakia, Hungary and so forth, consequently no promises were broken when these countries eventually joined NATO, inflaming Putin’s paranoia. American officials involved in the Baker-Gorbachev negotiations have confirmed this.

But why did Palazhchenko express this outright denial of the Putin narrative, not Gorbachev? If Gorbachev had, he would presumably have been harrassed by Putin for breaking their deal, whereas Palazhchenko was protected by his boss’s stature. Palazhchenko could not have made this contribution unilaterally, I think.

10 May
A prophetic statement?

Yel’tsin explained [1991] that the Commonwealth of Independent States was the only choice on the table: ‘The main task was not to have Russia and Ukraine on the opposite sides of the barricades.’ If Ukraine had its own Army, currency, state borders, ‘there would be no peace between Russia and Ukraine.’ […] Had Russia not agreed with Ukraine, ‘tomorrow our reality could be a trade blockade, closed borders, and economic wars… The worst that could have happened would be a war using nuclear weapons.’

The quotation comes from Vladislav Zubok’s monumental but riveting Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale University Press, 2021), p. 409. Yel’tsin is a much maligned figure. He was not at all minded to give Ukraine its independence, but in the end was persuaded that it was the right thing — within CIS, which was intended to be as loose as the British Commonwealth. What stands out in this book is the fundamental integrity of most of the political players in perestroika and the collapse, compared with Russia today.

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

11 May
I was struck by the body language of those with whom Putin interacted at the Victory Day celebration in Moscow — military, veterans of World War 2, and civilians. They treated him gingerly, but not because they were frightened of him. I swear they weren’t. There was even a smiling sort of gentleness and humanity towards the deranged dictator. I couldn’t make out what it reminded me of, but have now put my finger on it: the last years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, when he was a walking invalid, even zombie, yet was treated with almost touching respect. (There is something elementally Russian about this, perhaps Orthodox at root.) Putin, with his livid colour and bloated face, could not possibly be described as a well man. Presumably those closest to him know the truth or otherwise about an impending cancer operation, but as I read it Russians sense he is finished, whether clinically, morally or politically. Perhaps this collective intuition has even caused Putin’s decimated and humiliated generals in Ukraine to play for time. Putin may have committed to a protracted war in Ukraine, but will he live long enough to see it through?

Personally, I think Russians’ support for Putin’s war has declined to 50-55%. A sure sign is that more irony about him is emerging from Russia, in the form of wordplay and anecdotes. The word pobedobesie has been coined, for instance, meaning roughly ‘fiendish obsession with having won World War 2’, and the subtle ampirator. What Putin aspires to be is a Russian imperator like Alexander III, but ampirator suggests that he is not the real thing, only a piece of the Empire (ampir) Style furniture that he surrounds himself with. Meanwhile, apparently, just as Stalin was known amongst the narod (people) as Riaboi (Pock Face), so Putin is referred to as starik v bunkere (the old man in a bunker).

Mr Putin is 69.

14 May
Some of the visits by western celebrities to Ukraine begin to look like the embarrassing phenomenon of high profile people jumping on the latest band wagon. I do think it’s dangerous for Ukraine, as it trivialises what is a brutal war for independence. Always patient and polite, Zelensky did not seem comfortable during his encounters with Nancy Pelosi or Pierre Trudeau in Kiev; I am glad that, as a skilled actor, he managed to convey at all times that his mind was on far more serious things than celebrity culture. Celebrity visits like Nancy Pelosi’s and Jill Biden’s also risk the impression that Ukraine is going to be americanised. This would be a disaster for it, as it would prove Putin ‘right’ about the U.S. fighting a ‘proxy war’. The whole point about the war is that Ukraine has become a European nation state. As its Foreign Minister said recently, ‘Ukraine is the only place in Europe where people are dying for the values the EU is based on’.

Even in the midst of such life-and-death seriousness, Zelensky retains his comedic sense. Lots of people in its history have invaded Ukraine, he said recently, and Ukraine has always beaten them back. ‘Invaders can’t resist treading on the same rake.’ Brilliant!

16 May
I doubt whether I shall continue this commentary on Ukrainian events in the same form. For one thing, the delay between my writing an entry and it reaching you, the readers, can be a bit too long. But there are other reasons for pausing it, which I can’t reveal until the war is over, but which you may be able to imagine given the origins of Sam&Sam. Naturally, I will post in real time if/when there are dramatic developments.

The anger and disgust that the invasion evoked in me led me to express myself more frankly about Russia and Putinism in these ‘diaries’ than at any time in the past twenty years. I haven’t been to Russia since I was made persona non grata by the KGB in 1981, and I kept everything pretty bottled until February 2022. I don’t think you need (or want!) more from me on those subjects. I think my take on Putin’s Russia is clear.

Slava Ukraini!

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 Anatolii Chubais, anecdotes, Boris Yel'tsin, comedy, comments, Commonwealth of Independent States, Czechoslovakia, Empire style, Finland, Hungary, irony, Jill Biden, Leonid Brezhnev, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moscow, Nancy Pelosi, nuclear weapons, Pavel Palazhchenko, Pierre Trudeau, Poland, rakes, Russo-Ukrainian War, Stalin, The Crimea, Ukraine, Victory Day, Vladimir Putin, Vladislav Zubok, Volodymyr Zelensky, World War 2 | 2 Comments

War and woof poetry

Posted on May 11, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Judging by allusions and quotations in his speeches, Volodymyr Zelensky either has a good knowledge of literature himself, or his team does. Unlike Putin, he speaks in a cultured manner, beautifully clearly and expressively, with a literary turn.

In an appeal to the Russian nation before 24 February, Zelensky quoted from a 1961 poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko that has no title, but is known by its first line:

Do Russians want war?
Go and ask the stillness
over steppe and ploughed field,
ask the birches and poplars.
Go and ask the soldiers
who lie beneath those birches,
and their sons will tell you
whether Russians want war…

Yevtushenko’s poetry became very popular in Britain after the appearance of the above selection in 1962, vigorously translated by Peter Levi and Robin Milner-Gulland. The energy, love interest and note of rebellion perfectly suited 1960s English poetry. I bought the book when I was seventeen and two years later was reading Yevtushenko in Russian. Love lyrics such as ‘Deep Snow’, ‘My beloved will arrive at last’, or ‘When your face rose over my crumpled life’, had a fermentative effect on me at the time, as I’ve acknowledged in the Notes to stanza 6 of Making Icons.

By the mid-1970s, however, it was clear that Yevtushenko was not so much a rebel against the Soviet regime as a consummate compromiser with it. Thank God, he never wrote such chauvinist rant as Pushkin’s ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’ or Blok’s ‘Scythians’, but even his poem ‘Do Russians want war?’ wobbles on the issue. The suggestion in it that it was Russia alone who defeated Nazi Germany, and that Soviet soldiers fell ‘so that the people of the whole Earth/could dream in peace’, reminds me too much of the posters that Soviet propagandists put up in Berlin after the War captioned My khotim mira, which can mean both ‘We want peace’ and ‘We want the World’…

But I would never dismiss Yevtushenko as a poet or a person. He was prodigiously talented, in poetry, prose, film and self-performance. His was a big and perhaps tragically insecure personality. It seems to me that in his verse he consciously adapted the styles of Mayakovsky and Yesenin. Like Yesenin, he wrote a woefully sentimental poem about a dog. Here it is, in an affectionate translation-parody made by me when I was twenty-one:

TO MY DOG

My dog, his black nose pressed against the glass,
waits for the sound of feet along the path.

I run my hand through his coat,
like him am waiting for someone to appear.

Do you remember, dog, not so long ago
when a woman was living here?

But what after all was she to me?
A sister or a wife maybe,

at times a daughter, so it seemed,
whom I was bound to help somehow.

She’s far away… And you’re so subdued.
No other women will come here now.

My dear old dog, you’re not a bad codger,
but what a pity you don’t drink vodka!

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 Alexander Blok, Alexander Pushkin, Berlin, compromise, dogs, Nazi Germany, Peter Levi, propaganda, Red Army, Robin Milner-Gulland, Russia, Russian poetry, sentimentality, Sergei Yesenin, talant, To Russia's Slanderers, translation, USSR, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Putin, Volodomyr Zelensky, war poetry, World War 2, Yevgeny Yevtushenko | Leave a comment

A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 4

Posted on May 5, 2022 by Patrick Miles

23 April 2022

The procession has just set off through Stratford-upon-Avon. Foreground: the Shakespeare Institute’s delegation. Background: the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

It is St George’s Day, hypothetically William Shakespeare’s birthday, and we are in Stratford-upon-Avon witnessing the civic celebrations, which are beautifully done, inclusive, happy, humorous, almost a Spring flower festival, and a really moving tribute to Shakespeare’s ever-freshness. The previous evening, we had lived through a searing performance of Henry VI(2): Machtpolitik at its most brutal and realistic.

I keep coming back to the necessity of not letting our yearning for peace develop into wishful thinking about it. The problem is that reality is terrible, we would rather not have to face it, but if we lose our mental grip on it we risk fantasy and pure self-gratification (even virtue-signalling). A person born in Britain whose parents originated in the Donbas says that ‘any negotiations would be better than this killing’. It sounds true, stopping killing in order to negotiate sounds right, and a part of us wants peace ‘at any price’. But hostilities don’t usually stop during negotiations anyway, and the person who launched this criminal war against Ukraine self-evidently does not want genuine negotiations and peace. I heard Volodymyr Zelensky myself tell Clive Myrie ten days ago on television that he, Zelensky, ‘spent the first two years of my presidency trying to talk to Putin’.

24 April
A few days back, a GP Tweeted that judging by the activity of Putin’s left arm as he was sitting giving orders to his Minister of Defence, Putin has ‘late onset Rett syndrome’ and ‘probably has months to live’. Again, this might be a highly desirable diagnosis, but I don’t think it matches reality. Anyone who observed the way Putin from his earliest presidential years marched up a long red carpet, could see that he has a ‘torque’ in his body and swings with his right arm. We don’t know the origin of it, but the weakness in his left arm doesn’t seem to me to have got any worse. On the other hand, his face in recent years has become more and more bloated. Most people would assume he is on steroids. But what does this portend, and does it explain anything about his psychotic state?

26 April
Russian autocracy has a tradition of long-serving ministers of foreign affairs. There was Gorchakov, foreign minister for 25 years under Alexander II; Gromyko, Soviet foreign minister for 29 years; now there is Sergei Lavrov, foreign minister since 2004.

Lavrov is approaching Talleyrand’s genius for utterances that are so ambiguous, depending on the listener, that ultimately they mean nothing. Today in Moscow he said that he was convinced the war would end in ‘some kind of treaty’, but he added the wise-sounding rider that it would ‘depend, of course, on the military situations reached’. This could mean ‘stalemate as a result of Ukrainian successes’, or it could mean ‘Russian conquest of Ukraine and a deal with the puppet government we have always wanted to install’. Similarly, Lavrov opined that ‘in essence’ NATO was ‘engaging in a proxy war against Russia’. It sounds right, rather clever and persuasive in fact, but omits to mention that it was Russia invaded its neighbour Ukraine, brutally breaking international law, and it is Ukrainians who are defending their own country. Putin’s proxies in eastern Ukraine, e.g. the Wagner Group, have been Russians.

Sergei Lavrov in pensive mood

Actually, I believe that Lavrov is beginning to sweat. He is a ‘career diplomat’ who for years has made a more than comfortable living out of going along with Putin. Now the chips are down. The genuinely wise Andrei Kozyrev, who was Yel’tsin’s foreign minister and now lives in the U.S., said this of his former colleague when asked recently if Lavrov did not know that everything he was doing was wrong:

I’m not a psychologist. What I see is that people sometimes degrade morally. And again, it’s step by step. On the first step, you sell your soul. But the Faustian scene rarely unfolds immediately before you. The Devil doesn’t come in with a contract ‘dripping with blood’. It takes some time before you start to actually disregard human dignity.

The ghosts of Joachim von Ribbentrop, say, or Saddam Hussein’s long-serving foreign minister Tariq Aziz, should be troubling Sergei Lavrov.

28 April
Today The Times ran a long article by their Defence Editor entitled ‘Push to send arms before Russians encircle Donbas’. But really it could add nothing to what we have known since 19 April: the Ukrainians in East Ukraine are in a highly vulnerable situation and there’s no knowing how their attack/defence there will play out. The arms, of course, are vital, but so will be brilliant generalship. I am no military man, but I was brought up on Chester Wilmot’s 800-page The Struggle for Europe and I spent years immersed in World War 1 whilst writing my biography of George Calderon. I incline, therefore, to see the coming struggle in East Ukraine as a combination of WW2’s tank battles and WW1’s trench warfare (the Ukrainians have been dug in there for eight years). On paper Russia’s artillery and rocket power are overwhelming, so the trenches could be devastated. It will surely be vital for the Ukrainians not only to avoid being surrounded, but to withdraw to a hard salient which they can successfully hold and from which they can counterattack…

2 May
The Russian campaign has so far been a disaster for Putin: according to a leaked FSB assessment from last year, under sanctions the economy can survive only till June, the attack on Kiev and attempt to kill Zelensky failed spectacularly, the army’s atrocities have earned Putin global detestation and condemnation, the Russians still do not have domination of the air over Ukraine, Khar’kiv and Mariupol are still not securely in Russian hands, the Ukrainians have sunk the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet and other vessels, a quarter of a million young Russians have left Russia since 24 February and don’t intend coming back, now Russians are streaming across to Moldova from Transnistria as they don’t want to live under Putin either, and in David Petraeus’s words ‘the war seems to be forging Ukraine as a nation state even as it weakens Russia as an empire’. Putin has achieved the exact opposite of what he intended, then, as well as uniting and expanding NATO and personally bringing Russia closer to direct conflict with it. Andrei Kozyrev even believes the war is ‘unwinnable for Putin because he fights against the people’.

Yet Putin will continue, because he is doing it all for ‘Russia’…and La Russie, c’est moi. One can imagine him destroying everything around him like Hitler until he is left in a bunker. And as if the sheer relentless, sickening, senseless destruction and killing weren’t enough, he and his generals actually look sub-human: Gerasimov, Dvornikov, Mizintsev (‘the butcher of Mariupol’) are brutally ugly. I think of the mayor in Gogol’s Government Inspector: ‘All I can see around me are pigs’ snouts where there should be faces.’

4 May
Understandably, the question ‘why are the Russians like this?’ is still being debated in the press. One big explanation given is that Russia was deeply brutalised by seventy years of state genocide and ‘casual savagery is seared into its soul’ (David Aaronovitch). A second is that no one was ever held to account for the long night of terror. A third is that Russians have made no concerted attempt to come to terms with their twentieth-century past. That process started under Gorbachev and Yel’tsin, but was foreclosed by Putin.

Explanation (3) is what Russian dissidents and ‘catacomb Christians’ (i.e. Russian believers who reject the KGB-led Moscow Patriarchate) have long said. In the second volume of her memoirs, Nadezhda Mandel’shtam wrote of Russian society: ‘Until we have made sense of our past, there is no hope of rebirth.’ A Russian catacomb Christian wrote to me in 2010: ‘We are going nowhere because there has been no repentance, no recognition of our sins and errors, and no atonement for them.’

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 Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Aleksei Gromyko, Aleksei Kozyrev, Alexander Gorchakov, atonement, catacomb Christians, Charles Talleyrand, Chester Wilmot, comments, David Aaronovitch, David Petraeus, General Dvornikov, General Gerasimov, General Mezintsev, Henry VI, Joachim von Ribbentrop, KGB, Khar'kiv, Mariupol, medical diagnoses, military strategy, Moldova, Moscow Patriarchate, Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, NATO, Nikolai Gogol, proxy war, repentance, Rett Syndrome, Russia, Saddam Hussein, salients, Sergei Lavrov, St George's Day, steroids, Stratford-upon-Avon, tank battles, Tariq Aziz, The Donbas, Transnistria, trench warfare, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky, Wagner Group, William Shakespeare, World War 2, World War I | Leave a comment

A Not Nursery Rhyme

Posted on April 29, 2022 by Patrick Miles

DANDLING SONG

The cockroach and the hare
sat up and stared
when the new dark blue cowboys came down.

The wife bounced the cat
more and more on her lap
when the new dark blue cowboys rode into town.

When the new dark blue cowboys came to town
the little brown chub
leapt up on a tub,
the skinny kikimora
squeaked her femora,
and the oven-prong curly
proved quite unruly.

Then the new dark blue cowboys turned into mice
and vanished again through a hole in the ice.

wife – baba, a married peasant woman
kikimora – a very thin female house spirit
oven-prong – ukhvat, a short pitchfork with turned back tips used for putting pots in/out of an oven
With thanks to Sam2 for his motif-friezes © Patrick Miles, 2022

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.