“Soldiering, my dear madam, is the coward’s art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak. That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.” His first great success, Arms and …
At the end of August I paid a visit to Blists Hill Victorian Town in Shropshire – mainly as a fun and educational day out for the family, of course, but also because I’ve been watching it as the setting of the BBC historical recreation programme Victorian Pharmacy, the sequel to Victorian Farm. You might …
My metal pictures of the nighttime world of 1894 mainly involve darkness – with, of course, the occasional gas lamp or candle peering gingerly out of the gloom. In fact, many towns were investing in shockingly bright arc lighting, so bright in fact that it had to be lifted up onto a platform 150ft in …
I’m sorry to say that I’ve previously only been familiar with the Disney version of The Jungle Book, and while I was aware that the original was different, I didn’t realise that the almost entirely different story of Mowgli was only one of five included. Among the others we have the also-fairly-well-known story of Riki-Tikki-Tavi, …
Beginnings The first battery-operated telephone switchboard in Lexington, Massachusetts. Blackpool Tower The Manchester Ship Canal Tower Bridge in London Paris—Rouen Competition for Horseless Carriages, the first automobile competition. New Zealand enacts the world’s first minimum wage law. The National College of Music, London. Sir William Ramsay and Lord Rayleigh discover the first noble gas, …
The classic minstrel show is refracted through just about every aspect of American entertainment since. As a ritual, the minstrel show was as formalized as an exorcism. Each of its set parts has its own afterlife, appears peeking through a different window in American culture like a leering, priapic idiot glimpsed through a heavily barred …
Albert Edelfelt – Larin Paraske Édouard Vuillard – The Seamstress Eero Järnefelt – Raatajat Rahanalaiset (Under The Yoke) Henri-Edmond Cross – The Evening Air Lawrence Alma-Tadema — Unconscious Rivals Olga BoznaÅ„ska — Self-portrait Paul Gauguin – The Ancestors of Tehamana (Merahi metua no Tehamana) Peder Severin Krøyer — Summer Evening on Skagen’s Southern Beach Ramon …
First exhibited in 1893 in Berlin, The Scream was the culmination of Munch’s magnum opus, a series of paintings called The Frieze of Life. This depicted the course of human existence through burgeoning love and sexual passion to suffering, despair and death, in Munch’s highly original, proto-expressionist style. His titles, from Death in the Sickroom, …
Salomé is a rare instance in British theatrical history of an authentically ‘Symbolist’ drama. This means that it belongs with an innovative group of plays produced in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Conceived as an alternative to naturalism and the kind of plays that purported to represent life by reproducing everyday …
Grover Cleveland seems like a very suitable president for the tail-end of the Gilded Age, with the demeanor of a wealthy industrialist, a magnificent walrus moustache, a wife half his age and an obsession with the incomprehensible issue of the gold standard while the reconstruction of the South was being rolled back. A year into …
