The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George Calderon c.1901
George Calderon, 1912
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Captain of the 11
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Recent Comments
- Patrick Miles on The diary of a writer-publisher: 36 Wonderful, Andrew! Thank you very much. I will borrow that title, if you don't object... I hope you will allow Calderonia to feature your own next magnum opus after the Great... (February 28, 2026 at 8:18 am)
- Andrew Tatham on The diary of a writer-publisher: 36 A brilliantly evocative and thought-provoking medley of observations that would not be out of place in 'The collected life of a flat-cap penguin' (your words, only slightly... (February 27, 2026 at 9:48 am)
- John Pym on The essential Oxford novel Horace Hare’s acid and immensely readable Oxford Confessions deserve to sell even more pleasingly than Yale classicist Erich Segal’s Harvard/Radcliffe smash-hit weepie, Love... (January 29, 2026 at 2:39 pm)
- Graeme Wright on The essential Oxford novel If I may be so bold I'll throw into the Oxford quad Javier Marias's novel, All Souls. Here's a taste, courtesy of Penguin and Amazon: "At High Table in an Oxford College, the... (January 28, 2026 at 12:11 pm)
- Theo on Goathead is launched Dear Patrick, I wish you and Jim well in this new venture! Theo (November 11, 2025 at 2:00 pm)
Tag Archives: Cambridge
Goathead: The Complete Sonnets
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 ADVERTISEMENT SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN … Continue reading
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
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Very Old Cambridge Tales 5: ‘Stone’s Story’
‘Will you be going to Russia again?’ I asked Stone as we arrived back at his rooms from the college dinner he had stood me. ‘Not if I can help it!’ he retorted, unlocking the door and walking straight across … Continue reading
Cambridge Tales 8: ‘Black Tie’
Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged black ties, brain haemorrhages, Cambridge, Cambridge Tales, college life, Dante, funerals, Jonathan Palmer, Mikhail Bakhtin, mourning, Peter Cathercole, postgraduates, student pranks, The Divine Comedy, The Iliad, The University Arms, undergraduates, undertakers, wakes
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Cambridge Tales 7: ‘The Folding Party’
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Tagged Bedroom, Blue Pagoda, Cambridge, Cambridge Tales, Carcanet, Chris Hardie, Friedrich Hölderlin, G.W.F. Hegel, Gitanes, haiku, Helios, John Milton, Julian Slawianski, Karl Marx, Leonard Cohen, parties, Pink Floyd, poetry, poetry magazines, River Cam, students, suicide, Tintagel, undergraduates
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Very Old Cambridge Tales: 2
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 … Continue reading
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
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A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 3
11 April 2022 Whilst coming back from the shop with today’s newspaper, I could see a neighbour on the other side of the street who was born at the gates of Mauthausen concentration camp six days before it was liberated … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged 'The Steppe', Anton Chekhov, appeasement, Bellingcat, Bletchley, Cambridge, Crimea, Czechoslovakia, Dnipro, Donbas, Donetsk, FSB, KGB, Mauthausen, Max Hastings, morale, NATO, Nazi Germany, Polonia, Russia, Sergei Beseda, Simferopol, steppeland, tank battles, The Times, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky, Yalta, Yasinovataya, Zhdanov
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Guest post by Jim Miles: ‘DONG!’
The most striking aspect of Japan, right from the moment I arrived, was how different from the UK it wasn’t. People talk about culture shock and in particular how Japan ‘just does things differently’ (often with an almost-patronising ‘isn’t this … Continue reading
Posted in Personal commentary
Tagged bells, Buddhist monks, Buddhist temples, Cambridge, Casillero del Diablo, Christmas, culture shock, England, etiquette, food, friendliness, Goto family, islands, James Miles, Japan, KFC, kindergarten, language teaching, New Year, population densities, Shōgatsu, Snickers, Toyohashi, traffic lights
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Health Warning
I have decided I must go public about the nine years of frustration that the owner of the Calderon Papers and I endured as we tried to find a permanent home for them in a British archival institution. It was … Continue reading
Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary
Tagged 'Thunderer', archival management, archive donations, archive sales, archives, biography, British archives, Calderon Family Papers, Cambridge, cataloguing, comments, communication, conservation, customer care, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Harvard University, Kittie Calderon, The Spectator, The Times
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And Professor Rose was not German!
Probably the biggest remaining mystery of George’s biography is: what happened to all his papers associated with researching Slavonic folklore and primitive religions? The book Demon Feasts (or whatever it would have been entitled) was, after all, to be his … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Personal commentary
Tagged Basil Pares, Bernard Pares, biographies, biography, Cambridge, Canada, comments, Congress for the History of Religions, Demon Feasts, folklore, Fritz Epstein, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, history of religions, Kittie Calderon, Leipzig, Manitoba, Mass., Michael Pursglove, Minnedosa, mysteries, Oxford, Percy Lubbock, Poland, Professor Rose of Leipzig, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, serendipity, Silesia, SSEES, The Great War, William John Rose, World War I, Ypres, Zbigniew Folejewski
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Heffers surrenders after 7-month siege
As well as online and by personal communication with me, my biography of George Calderon can now be bought at the following bookshops: Blackwell’s of Oxford, Daunts of Hampstead, Foyles of Charing Cross Road, Jarrolds of Norwich, the National Archives … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian English, Personal commentary
Tagged biographies, Blackwell's, Cambridge, comments, Daunts, Foyles, George Calderon, Heffers, independent publishing, Jarrolds, marketing, National Archives, Oxford, Polonia, publishers, sale or return, Sam&Sam, selling books, Victor Meldrew
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The Announcement
We have now received the book in Cambridge — and we think Clays Ltd have done a superb job! Any flaws you notice will be of the author’s making; Clays have printed to the last foreign font and idiosyncrasy … Continue reading
Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged ABE, Amazon, Andrew Tatham, biographies, biography, Cambridge, Clays Ltd, comments, Dardanelles, Gallipoli, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Georgina Aldridge, Harvey Pitcher, Jodi Foulgar, John Dewey, Kindle, Kittie Calderon, limited edition, Martin Shaw, Nielsen Corporation, Oxford, publishers, Sam&Sam, St Andrews, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, World War I, Ypres
2 Comments
A skipped life
For my taste, this book is the most innovative biography since Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life (see 15 October 2016). Although reviewed positively when it appeared last year, it is so original that I defy anyone to get their head quite round … Continue reading
Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary
Tagged 'real time', A Life Discarded, Alexander Masters, biographies, biography, Cambridge, diaries, fiction, graphologists, John Aubrey: My Own Life, Laura Francis, Laurence Sterne, private detectives, Ruth Scurr, Simon: The Genius in my Basement, Stuart: A Life Backwards, Tristram Shandy
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Goathead is launched
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 … Continue reading →