WRITER & HISTORIAN
When his father, Rama II, died in 1824, the Siamese throne was taken by Mongkut’s older half-brother, who ruled as Rama III. Mongkut himself, aged 19, joined a monastery. This wasn’t unusual: three months as a monk was customary. Mongkut stayed for twenty-seven years, becoming known as Mongkut the Beggar. While in orders Mongkut spearheaded... 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 →
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 →
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 →
“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 →
Was it even a revolt? Afterwards, the government was doubtful. But in January 1872 the man on the ground in Punjab, deputy commissioner John Lambert Cowan, was sure. There had been unrest among the minority Namdhari Sikh population – ‘Kukas’, the British called them – in what was a Muslim region. The Muslim slaughter of... Continue Reading →
It wasn’t until June 1868, when 24-year-old Marie-Catherine Fritzgès fell ill at the Pension Desarzens in Geneva, that the authorities acted. It was much too late. Fritzgès had been befriended by a fellow guest, Marie Jeanneret, a nurse, herself only 32. Jeanneret poisoned her with atropine, a derivative of belladonna, deadly in large doses. Fritzgès... Continue Reading →
Who was Caspar Hauser? No-one knew. He stepped into the world in Nuremberg on Whit Monday in 1828 towards the end of the afternoon. A shoemaker in the Unschlitt Platz – named for the city’s nearby store of fat and tallow – saw him first. Hauser’s posture and gait caught the eye: he struggled to... Continue Reading →
Death in the Victorian capital of the British Empire was problematic. “London graveyards are all bad,” the Board of Health reported gloomily, “differing only in degrees of badness”. There were 200 of them covering some 218 acres, yet by 1842 they were having to absorb over 50,000 new residents a year. “A London churchyard is... Continue Reading →
Gunfights and killings were news in Tombstone, Arizona but not headline news. One town paper had a regular column for such things titled ‘Death’s Doings’; the paper itself was mordantly named The Tombstone Epitaph. Not gallows humour exactly; trigger-finger humour, perhaps. Justice was rough to non-existent in the post-Civil War American south west. A bank... Continue Reading →
Was it true, as Giorgio Vasari wrote in The Lives of the Artists, that oil painting was invented in the 15th century by Jan van Eyck – he calls him Giovanni da Bruggia – and brought to Italy by Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who traveled to Flanders to learn the secret of its making?... Continue Reading →
The British Empire, the East African Chronicle wrote in 1921, was a “wonderful conglomeration of races and creeds and nations”. It offered “the only solution to great problem of mankind – the problem of brotherhood. If the British Empire fails then all else fails.” Stirring words. Not those of some sentimental old Colonel Blimp back... Continue Reading →
Napoleon loved his bath. Sometimes he lay in it for an hour or two, holding meetings or listening while an aide read him his correspondence. “One hour in the bath is worth four hours of sleep,” he said. Afterwards came the frictions, a cleansing ritual of his own devising. He stood naked and poured a... Continue Reading →
“The fine arts are five in number: painting, music, poetry, sculpture, and architecture – whereof the principal branch is confectionery.” It’s a bold point of view, even for a patissier. But Antonin Carême, personal chef to the rich and powerful of early 19th-century imperial France, was nothing if not ambitious. Born on 8 June 1783... Continue Reading →
Alexis de Tocqueville saw some of them, in the dead of winter 1831, while researching what would become Democracy in America. They were Choctaw, crossing the Mississippi at Memphis. Among them were the wounded and the sick, new-born babies, old men at the point of death. Snow had frozen hard on the ground; great blocks... Continue Reading →
Artist José Guadalupe Posada was born on 2 February 1852 in the city of Aguascalientes in central Mexico. Biographical details are scant. He produced over 20,000 engravings across his career, first using lithography, then wood- and metal-cuts, and finally relief etching, a technique most associated with William Blake. But when he died in January 1913,... Continue Reading →
The Anglo-Ashanti wars began with a debacle for the British. On 8 January 1824, word reached Cape Coast that the Ashanti were advancing. Sir Charles M’Carthy, newly appointed governor, divided up the forces at his disposal and hurried a few hundred men up country. They waded through waist-deep mud and slept exposed to torrential rain.... Continue Reading →
Charles Dickens, visiting Rome early in 1845, found himself haunted by a painting he saw. It was, he said, “almost impossible to be forgotten”. It was of a young woman in white, with a white turban; she is looking back over her left shoulder towards the artist. Dickens saw in her eyes “celestial hope, and... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 