WRITER & HISTORIAN
On 7 September 1592, the Madre de Dios was brought into the harbour at Dartmouth. Seven decks high and weighing some 1,600 tonnes, it was the largest ship England had ever seen. It was also the richest. Its hold was packed with luxury goods: silk, damask, taffeta, calico; carpets, quilts, canopies; pepper, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon;... Continue Reading →
The Roma are an Indian people. They left what is now north-west India and Pakistan in the early decades of the 11th century for reasons which will likely never be known, but which may relate to incursions by Muslim armies in the region. They moved west around the Caspian and into the Byzantine Empire by... Continue Reading →
I didn’t recognise the book on my shelf. I barely noticed it, scanning the titles quickly for a different one I had mislaid. But somehow the thin tattered spine of its dusty, crumbling dust jacket caught my eye as it rested in the dark, shadowed end of the book case. It was one of my... Continue Reading →
There are few, if any, more transient and precarious forms of publishing than small-press poetry magazines. But it still came as a shock when Ambit closed its doors in February this year. Founded in 1959, Ambit’s storied past had featured everyone from William Burroughs to Stevie Smith, from Linton Kwesi-Johnson to Carol Ann Duffy. But... Continue Reading →
In November 1901 a woman named Auguste Deter was admitted to the Municipal Asylum for Epileptics and Lunatics in Frankfurt. She was fifty-one years old. Paranoid delusions about her husband’s fidelity had given way to amnesia and disorientation; she failed to recognise old friends and forgot life’s daily occurrences the moment they were past. Soon... Continue Reading →
Ben Jonson called it “the poetry of steeples”. In his Bedfordshire youth, John Bunyan was seduced by, if not addicted to, its pleasures. So ubiquitous was bell ringing to England in the 17th century that at least two sources from the 1650s – a religious tract and a poem – attest to the country’s nickname,... Continue Reading →
My parents are both now dead. My father died last, aged 90, in 2016. I had always associated my love of books with my mother’s influence. My father’s passing, however, made me realise ‒ too late ‒ that most of the books I turn to for comfort are those to which he introduced me. I... Continue Reading →
The numbers are extraordinary. Charles M Schulz, whose centenary falls on 26 November 2022, spent nearly fifty years of his life producing daily comic strips for Peanuts. Between 2 October 1950 and his death in February 2000, he drew a staggering 17,897 of them. He retired in December 1999 after a series of strokes and... Continue Reading →
John Payne Collier. Three words sure to chill the heart of any scholar working on early-modern literary texts. Why? Because Collier was that most interesting of phenomena: a fine scholar who was also a first-class fraud. It is to posterity’s chagrin that he lived to the age of 94 – Collier died on 17 September... Continue Reading →
In 1688 a 19-year-old medical student from Berne named Johannes Hofer observed a condition that medicine had yet to define. Symptoms of this ‘melancholy delirium’ might include fever, disturbed sleep, palpitations, loss of appetite and anxiety – sometimes ultimately leading to death. Hofer noted the case of a fellow student from Berne, now living in... Continue Reading →
“It was a long hot summer.” Thus Lord Scarman begun his account of the small dispute at Grunwick, a film-processing company in north-west London, which escalated into one of the defining industrial conflicts of the late 1970s. The dispute began with the sacking of a young worker, Devshi Bhudia, for slow work on Friday 20th... Continue Reading →
John Masefield was in his last year as Poet Laureate when I was born in 1966. I remember copying out his poem ‘Cargoes’ in primary school – "Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir . . ." – and wondering what all these strange, beautiful-sounding words meant as I laboured over my ascenders and descenders. That... Continue Reading →
As the nine-year-old Edward VI rode through London on the way to his coronation in Westminster Abbey in February 1547, he paused for a while to watch a man perform on a tightrope strung from the steeple of St Paul’s. He might have been advised to study the man who rode ahead of him too.... Continue Reading →
On 4 August 1540, Thomas Epsam, a former monk of the Benedictine Abbey at Westminster, was brought from Newgate and made to stand before the justices. He had been a prisoner for three years, but still “he wold not aske the kynges pardon nor be sworne to be true to him”, the chronicler Edward Hall... Continue Reading →
In the last days of 1835 the explorer Robert Schomburgk stood on the shores of Lake Amucu in western central Guiana. In April, the surrounding savannah would be inundated by the rising tides of two nearby river systems creating the illusion of a great body of water; but now, in December, the waters were low.... Continue Reading →
William G, one of the two protagonists of Russell Hoban’s third novel Turtle Diary (1975), is walking home from work one evening. He notices a manhole cover for the first time. Its number is K257. At home he looks up K257 in a Mozart Companion and discovers that K257 is the Credo Mass in C.... Continue Reading →
Around noon on 30 January 1889 Austria’s official newspaper Wiener Zeitung in Vienna reported that 30-year-old Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the fraying and fractious Austro-Hungarian Empire, husband of Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, had died that morning of a stroke. It was a lie. The following day, the court issued a clarification: Rudolf had died... Continue Reading →
We don’t know his real name. In ancient inscriptions it appears as Yhw, Yhwh, or simply Yh; but because Hebrew used a script which elided vowel sounds we don’t know how his earliest followers might have said it. He has come to be known as Yahweh, but Yaho, Yahu or Yah are also possibilities. Perhaps... Continue Reading →
What’s in a name? Antwerp, it was said, derived from the words werpen and hand, meaning ‘throwing’ and ‘hand’. In this telling, a Roman soldier named Brabo cut off the hand of a giant, Druon Antigon, who stood on the banks of the Scheldt and demanded payment of a toll. Even in its foundation myth,... Continue Reading →
It’s 1966 and 10-year-old Taeko has failed a maths test. Her mother, washing dishes in the kitchen, asks one of Taeko’s older sisters to help. The sister is horrified. “Is she alright in the head?” she asks. “Normally this is easy.” “But that child’s not normal,” her mother says, just as Taeko comes downstairs into... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 