WRITER & HISTORIAN
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 →
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 →
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 →
Halfway up the high street in Totnes, a small town on the river Dart in Devon, a modest stone is set into the edge of the road. It claims to mark the point at which Brutus, legendary founder of Britain, first set foot in these islands. Grandson of the equally legendary Trojan hero Aeneas, Brutus... 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 →
To her enemies, she was Mrs Satan. To Walt Whitman, she was “a prophecy of the future”. To Gloria Steinem, from the vantage point of the 1970s, she was “the most controversial suffragist of them all”. But to the Equal Rights Party on 6 June 1872, she was their newly ratified candidate for the presidency... Continue Reading →
The Columbian Exchange is a much discussed phenomenon, but it can have had few more surprising consequences than the near total destruction of European wine production in the 19th century. The cause was phylloxera, a microscopic yellow aphid native to the eastern coast of the United States, that feeds exclusively on the roots of grapevines.... Continue Reading →
The way George Soper told it, it might have been a case for Sherlock Holmes. “The typhoid epidemic that broke out in the Summer home of Mr George Thompson at Oyster Bay was a puzzling affair,” he told the New York Times. It was 1906 and typhoid was rampant in the city; nearly 700 died... Continue Reading →
Amelia Earhart, aged 40, disappeared with her plane and her navigator on 2 July 1937 on the longest leg on what was intended to be the first circumnavigation of the world by a woman in an airplane. How does that fact change how we read her life? She was, her high-school yearbook said, “the girl... Continue Reading →
Gone with the Wind, the 1939 film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel – which, to say the least, valorises the antebellum South – was always controversial. When producer David O Selznick announced the production, his decision was widely condemned by civil-rights organisations such as the NAACP. African-American actors who took roles in the film were... Continue Reading →
Silent Night is one of the best-known songs in the world. It has been translated into over 200 languages and one version alone, Bing Crosby’s 1937 recording, sold over 30 million copies. But who knows anything of its authors? The lyrics to Silent Night were written by a somewhat loose-living Austrian priest named Joseph Mohr... Continue Reading →
Guys and Dolls, the musical loosely based on the Broadway stories of Damon Runyon, premiered on Broadway on November 24th 1950. It ran for 1,200 performances and has been frequently revived ever since. The film version, starring Frank Sinatra as Nathan Detroit and Marlon Brando as Sky Masterson, appeared in 1955. Even on the page,... Continue Reading →
Nat Turner was born into slavery on a Virginia plantation, on 2 October 1800. Convinced from an early age that he was a prophet, Turner taught himself to read and write. His spiritual path mirrors that of other mystics: he maintained an austere life apart from the wider community; he fasted and prayed; he sought... Continue Reading →
Whenever Dominic Cummings makes the headlines, commentators reach for the same word to describe his relationship with the prime minister: he is Boris Johnson’s Svengali, they write. But who was the original Svengali? Svengali is one of those rare literary creations so seemingly archetypal his name becomes short-hand for a kind of behaviour: in this... Continue Reading →
Otto von Bismarck was once asked to identify the pre-eminent fact in modern world history. That America spoke English, he replied. In Emigrants, James Evans attempts to explain how and why that happened. For much of the 17th century, England was something of a failed state. In mid-century it collapsed into a brutal and protracted... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 