WRITER & HISTORIAN
The young girl in the painting is running towards us through an overgrown spring garden, its trees heavy with dazzling white blossom. Behind her is a bombsite – this is London in March 1950 – also overgrown. Other children are crouching among the bushes and the long grass, hunkered down behind the low garden walls,... Continue Reading →
If the purpose of imperial art is to inspire deference and awe, there is abundant evidence of its effect at The Great Mughals, the ravishingly beautiful new show at London’s V&A. The exhibition, which is a prelude to a major redesign of the museum’s South Asia gallery, covers the golden age of the Mughal Empire,... Continue Reading →
Three women are toiling in the field, gathering in the harvest barley. Or rather, two are bent double, scything through the stalks with short-handled sickles while behind a third pauses to stretch her back. It looks excruciating work. No doubt it was. England in the first half of the 14th century was in large part... Continue Reading →
To the physician Tobias Venner, in his Via recta ad vitam longam of 1620, they were ‘Anchovas, the famous meat of drunkards’, only good ‘to commend a cup of wine to the pallat, and… therefore chiefly profitable for Vintners’. No surprise, then, that Prince Hal finds a receipt for ‘Anchovies and sack after supper’ in... Continue Reading →
Beowulf is a poem steeped in mystery and otherness. It survives in only one manuscript, the Nowell Codex, named for its owner in the 16th century. The manuscript itself was fortunate to survive a fire that engulfed the library that housed it in 1731. Its edges are still charred and flaky: that’s how close it... 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 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 →
On Barnes Common in West London, one midnight in the early days of 1955, a policeman approached four men sitting in a parked car. They were wearing velvet-collared jackets, stovepipe trousers, bootlace ties and crepe-soled shoes. ‘Teddy Boys’, he thought to himself. “Now then you lot,” he told them. “Get weaving before I pinch you.”... Continue Reading →
Sometime in 1506, the Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius, stopped at a tavern in the German town of Gelnhausen. There he encountered Doctor Faustus - then going by the name of Georg Sabellicus - handing out what were in essence business cards. Faustus was, the cards said, “the chief of necromancers, an astrologer, the second magus,... 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 →
“All I desire is fame,” wrote Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, in the preface to her first book, a collection of poetry, in 1653. “Fame is nothing but a great noise… therefore I wish my book may set a-work every tongue.” As a statement of the workings of celebrity it is remarkably modern. But it... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 