When the connoisseur Gerrit Braancamp died in 1771, the auction of his collection was one of Amsterdam’s events of the year. Some twenty thousand people saw it; two thousand copies of the catalogue were sold. The two most valuable paintings – a triptych by Gerard Dou known as ‘The Nursery’ and ‘Large Drove of Oxen’... Continue Reading →
Mongkut of Siam: Anna Leonowens’ philosopher king
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 →
The great fire of Smyrna
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 →
The first Norman king of Sicily
© 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 →
Milk bars: the craze of the age
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 →
Umbrellas in the mist: the sorry story of the Eglinton Tournament of 1839
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 Tame and the Wild by Marcy Norton
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 →
Paul Verlaine shoots Arthur Rimbaud
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 →
The decipherment of Linear B
“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 →
Miyamoto Musashi: a Samurai master of time
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 →
Orwell’s road to Nineteen Eighty-Four
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 →
The Rational Dress Society
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 →
Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession
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 →
Little Jack, the boy missionary
“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 →
Einhard: historian, sinner, manlet
They must have looked odd together, the Frankish king and the courtier who later memorialised him. Charlemagne was tall for the period, around six foot three. Einhard meanwhile, his friend Walahfrid wrote, was “despicable in stature” – a “tiny manlet”, in Einhard’s own phrase. Born into a family of modest wealth, Einhard was educated at... Continue Reading →
Ovid in exile
Ovid was with a friend on Elba in the autumn of 8AD when the crisis broke. A summons arrived for him from the emperor, Augustus. Were the rumours true, his friend asked. Ovid equivocated, half confessing, half denying. Two millennia later, we still don’t know what had happened; we only know what happened next. Following... Continue Reading →
The Bonfire of the Vanities
‘Piagnoni’, they were sometimes called: the ‘weepers’. They were gangs of teenage boys and young men – mostly middle class – who patrolled the streets of Florence in the 1490s, hurling abuse at the impious – drunks, gamblers, women – and hurling stones too. They were called ‘pinzocheroni’, too: bigots. They, like the city, were... Continue Reading →
The crusade against the pagan north: Livonian Knights, the frozen Baltic and the Battle of Karuse
It wasn’t exactly a motto, but they liked it nonetheless. “The sword is our Pope,” the Livonian Knights said, “and it is a Pope that is never far from you.” Formerly known the Sword Brothers, the Livonian Knights were a military monastic order akin to the Knights Templar. They were founded around 1202 to bring... Continue Reading →
A Sikh uprising against the British Empire: the Kuka Revolt of 1872
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 →
Belladonna, bonbons and murder: the strange case of 19th-century serial killer Marie Jeanneret
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 →
Mathew Lyons 