WRITER & HISTORIAN
It was, Strabo said, “the finest city in Asia”. But ruin was in Smyrna’s bones. It was destroyed by Lydia and Persia, and later by the Seljuks and the army of Timur. In Revelations, it is one of Asia’s seven churches - known for its tribulations, St John said. To the Ottomans, who took it... Continue Reading →
© Matthias Süßen, CC BY-SA 4.0 It has been said that Roger II, self-styled Rex Siciliae et Italiae, conceived of his kingdom as a “work of art”. Perhaps he did. But if so, contemporary reviews were mixed at best. To Bernard of Clairvaux he was “the Sicilian usurper”; to the Byzantine Theodore Prodromos he was... Continue Reading →
She must have been a powerful swimmer. Her name was Hydna and she grew up in the port town of Scione on the northern coast of the Aegean. It was 480BC, and the Graeco-Persian Wars were raging. The Persians had amassed a vast fleet and it was anchored off Thessaly in eastern Greece, waiting for... Continue Reading →
His name was Hugh Donald McIntosh. An Australia-born entrepreneur he was a sometime fight promoter, theatrical producer and newspaper magnate. But by 1935 he was a recovering bankrupt. Previous attempts to resurrect his fortune included an angora rabbit farm and a cake shop. Now the man they called 'Huge Deal' McIntosh had a better idea.... Continue Reading →
It began as a joke. There were grumbles of conservative discontent about the lack of ceremony at the coronation of Queen Victoria in June 1838. Where was the ceremonial banquet? they asked. Where was the Royal Champion? They called it the ‘Penny Crowning’, a cheap and tawdry shadow of the real thing. A few weeks... Continue Reading →
The six wives of Henry VIII occupy a curious place in the public mind. We all know who they are; but how many of us know who they were? Unlike most of their contemporaries, it’s not oblivion they need rescuing from, it’s caricature. A new exhibition about them at London’s National Portrait Gallery is pointedly... Continue Reading →
Sometime in 1543 on the island of Hispaniola, a group of Spanish soldiers searching for runaway slaves came across three seemingly feral pigs in the wilderness. The Spanish slaughtered them without a thought. But then they met an Indigenous man. He was distraught. He had been living in the wild for 12 years, and had... Continue Reading →
Absinthe. Libidinal sex. Symbolist poetry. A heady combination, you might think. Throw in a penchant for violence and you have trouble. It was certainly all too much for Paul Verlaine. In 1871, he was 27 and if not happily married then surely securely so, and about to become a father. He had, though, stopped writing... Continue Reading →
“Did you say the tablets haven’t been deciphered, sir?” The question came from the youngest member of a party of schoolboys on a tour of the Minoan Room at the Royal Academy of Arts, in 1936. The man being addressed was Sir Arthur Evans, then 85. The boy was 14 and his name was Michael... Continue Reading →
Sometime around the turn of the 20th century, Grace Hannam, a Methodist missionary to the poor of London, moved from the West London Mission at St Pancras to the Bermondsey Settlement, another progressive, not to say idealistic, social outreach project south of the river. As her possessions were being carried into her new flat in... Continue Reading →
It was around three or four o’clock in the afternoon, on a spring Sunday in the Oklahoma Panhandle in 1935. In the house, Ada Kearns remembered, the radio was on. And then, out of the blue, it wasn’t. “This is Dodge City,” the announcer said abruptly. “We’re going off the air.” A vast storm cloud... Continue Reading →
As a Samurai, Miyamoto Musashi liked to play with time. It was, in a way, a question of balance. In 1612, he had fought a duel against with Sasaki Kojiro, a swordsman known as the Demon of the Western Provinces. The agreed location was a small, uninhabited island in the Straits of Shimonoseki. Kojiro arrived... Continue Reading →
His first published work, a poem, appeared in the autumn of 1914. ‘Awake! Young Men of England’ was a patriotic rallying cry for a beleaguered nation at war. He was 11 years old and his name was Eric Blair. He took up the pen-name George Orwell in 1932 for his first book. (Other names considered... Continue Reading →
Women, wrote the feminist Charlotte Stopes in 1890, were suffering under “the Despotism of the goddess Fashion… the most powerful goddess on the earth”. Stopes was a member of the Rational Dress Society, which campaigned for health, comfort and beauty in women’s clothing – and practicality, too. Stopes knew many women, she wrote, who began... Continue Reading →
On 3 April 1897, nineteen painters and sculptors met in a Viennese coffee house. Out of the meeting came a new arts movement, the Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs, better known as the Viennese Secession. At its head was a young Gustav Klimt. Art in Vienna was controlled by the Künstlerhaus, the artists’ professional body. The... Continue Reading →
“What more pleasing to a Christian parent whose heart yearns over his children… [than] to see them thus engaged in the best of all causes, even the extension of the Redeemer’s kingdom,” wrote the Methodist Joseph Blake in The Day of Small Things, his 1849 tract encouraging the promotion of missionary zeal to the youngest... Continue Reading →
It was an absolute delight to review the glorious Tirzah Garwood exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery for Engelsberg Ideas.
I am absolutely thrilled to have two poems in this anthology from Amethyst Review, which is available here in the UK and here in the US. My poems are titled: 'Ely Considered as a Light Farm', and 'Listening to the Dead'.
“I always see the faults of my friends,” writes Walburga, Lady Paget, in the introduction to her 1923 two-volume memoir Embassies of Other Days. “But I like their faults and I mention them as it adds to the piquancy of their personalities.” The second volume closes with a further disclaimer. “I have related everything exactly... Continue Reading →
I really enjoyed talking to the great Dan Snow about Walter Ralegh and El Dorado on Dan's History Hit podcast. Listen to it here!
Mathew Lyons 