Tag Archives: EU

The Europeans 2019

Pull on your driving gloves, Gordon, Light up your Billiard pipe! Edge out and I’ll slam shut the garage, We’re off to the civilized life! In two hours we’ll be down at Dover, This Bentley’s not going near Fife! Cher Bertrand, chère … Continue reading

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The diary of a writer-publisher: 37

23 March 2026 Ten days after jotting down the first lines, I type up some verses entitled ‘The Europeans 2019’. I’ve long wanted to write something like it, as a joke, and various recent events triggered it. If you recall, … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The diary of a writer-publisher: 35

13 October 2025 There were a number of letters in The Times earlier this month describing butterflies that the authors had witnessed turning up at funerals and even settling on the coffin. The point was that people found it mysterious and strangely … Continue reading

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Man of sorrows

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 2

5 April 2022 When I contemplated the image from Kyiv that I posted last week, as well as Bruegel I thought of Isaac Babel’s stories Red Cavalry about the Russo-Polish War of 1919-21. Some of that war took place in … Continue reading

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Empires end like this…

There are two reasons that obtaining Permissions has taken so long, in my case at least (see 17 April and 20 April). First, although I rapidly earmarked the sixteen ‘major’ sources of quoted unpublished material in my biography, e.g. William Rothenstein, … Continue reading

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The U.K./E.U. copyright chimaera: a postscript

Following my last post, I began to wonder if, after all, I hadn’t overdone it. But I soon received a number of emails approving of my copyright ‘polemic’, ‘evisceration’, ‘logical deconstruction’, as they called it. From details in these emails, … Continue reading

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The triumph of…what?

Given that my post about George’s 1913 visit to Madeira was up for over a fortnight, that Alison’s guest post (which was another in the ‘new biographies’ series) has been up for ten days, and on 21 April Laurence Brockliss’s … Continue reading

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

‘The Long Shadow’, War Poetry, and Commemoration

  Faithful followers of this blog will recall my account on 16 December 2015 of Professor David Reynolds’s public lecture ‘Making Peace with the Great War: Centenary Reflections’. I have now read the book behind the lecture (see above) and … Continue reading

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Watch this Space

9/12/15. Cambridge Professor of International History David Reynolds’s lecture at the Perse School on 2 December entitled ‘Making Peace with the Great War: Centenary Reflections’, was a virtuoso performance — restrained, relaxed, magisterial, deeply challenging. The audience of about a hundred and … Continue reading

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment