WRITER & HISTORIAN
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 →
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 →
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 →
“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 →
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 →
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 late 16th century was a precarious time to be involved in – or just to meet anyone involved in – the theatre. There was cash flow, of course. And the threat of closure, on either political or health-and-safety grounds. But there were other risks too. One of them was death. For a small group... Continue Reading →
In late November 1935, Virginia Woolf went to see a production of Romeo and Juliet. She was not overly impressed. “Acting it,” she wrote, “they spoil the poetry”. Harsh words, you might think, for a cast that included John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft. But Shakespeare on the stage was always something of a... Continue Reading →
Was there anything, aside from consanguinity, that united the Tudor dynasty as it lurched back and forth from Catholicism to Protestantism across the middle decades of the 16th century? One answer to that question, surprisingly, was a man named William Somer, Henry VIII’s last and best-loved fool. It is not simply that surviving court accounts... 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 →
“‘Deep breath,’ says the doctor. I take one and hold it.” Thus begins the fourth chapter in Ann Wroe’s new book, Lifescapes. It is apt, because this is a book about the breath of life itself. It is good advice for the reader too: Wroe’s writing is intense and visionary, bordering on the ecstatic. But... 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 →
The Archpriest Avvakum Petrov spent the last fourteen years of his life in a pit in Pustozersk, high above the Arctic Circle. Born around 1620 in a small village in Nizhny Novgorod, he had become a leading figure among the Old Believers in the schism that split the Russian church in the 17th century. Patriarch... Continue Reading →
Elizabeth Justice was surely not alone in being young and unhappily married in 18th-century London. Where she was singular, however, was in how she responded to her circumstance. She insisted on separating from her husband, Henry Justice, after he “struck her such a blow on the head that it swelled much”. Then, when he persistently... 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 →
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 →
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 his Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times, Flann O’Brien once proposed a book-handling service for ‘illiterate, but wealthy, upstarts so that [their] books will look as if they have been read and re-read by their owners’. At the entry level, ‘Popular Handling’, this would involve dog-earing four leaves in each volume and the... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 