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anti-Sudanese racism in Australia. Shame, ministers, shame!!
My entire ancestry comes from Russia, my in-laws all came from Czechoslovakia and our descendants live in Australia and Israel. Thus I no personal connection to Sudan. Nonetheless the Sudanese...
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Scandal in Bohemian, arty Melbourne - murder of Mollie Dean (1930)
A Scandal in Bohemia by Gideon Haigh (Hamish Hamilton, 2018) tells an incredible story. Mollie Dean (1905-30) was very attractive Melburnian, a young woman who had great plans for the future. Many...
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a history of bridge games - in Turkey, Russia, Britain, France and the USA
Let us start with whist. The history of Whist can be traced at least to the early C16th in England (as mentioned in a published sermon by Bishop Latimer in 1529) and through succeeding centuries...
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a Tartan Heritage Centre in Stirling Scotland! history, research and tourist...
The Tartan Weaving Mill on The Royal Mile in Edinburgh covers 5 storeys inside, with an exhibition that shows the whole process involved in tartan production: shearing sheep, working looms, making a...
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Vienna is the World's Most Liveable City 2018. Sorry Melbourne and Osaka
The Economist Intelligence Unit is a British business providing forecasting and advisory services through research and analysis, including country, industry and management analyses world-wide. Plus, as...
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Borscht - every family has a food that warms the heart and soul
My family’s borscht is milchig (no meat), made up of beetroot, potato, cabbage, somewhat bitter sorrel and sour cream; it was the heart and soul of my grandmother’s Russian cuisine. From my friends at...
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Marco Polo and his travels over the Silk Roads
The Silk Road was a trade route for precious silk, but not only silk. It became an East-West network of inter-connecting routes linking Central Asian Kingdoms (eg Bukhara, Samarkand, Bishkek and...
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Boy Scouts gone primitive - Kibbo Kift
The origins of the boy scout movement have been well documented and well read. Col. Robert Baden-Powell (1857–1941) had long been very familiar with the organisation called The Boys' Brigade, founded...
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Guernica by Picasso: anti-war in general or pro-Republican specifically?
Pablo Picasso was born in 1881, in Málaga Spain. Landmarks of the artist’s childhood are still vibrant today in this sunlit Mediterranean city. The Church of Santiago was where Picasso was...
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Looted art in Germany and France - Hildebrand and Cornelius Gurlitt
Notable German art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956) was the son of a famous art historian, Cornelius Gurlitt I (1850–1938), and grandson of Louis Gurlitt (1812–1897), an important C19th...
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Dr Albert Coates - hero in medicine, surgery and war
Albert Coates (1895-1977) was born in Ballarat in Central Victoria, oldest of seven children of strong Methodists Arthur and Clara Coates. Although money was short, Arthur and Clara raised their...
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William Hogarth and Trump
I can recognise and love every one of William Hogarth's (1697-1764) works of art. What I did NOT realise that one of his dogs, Trump (c1730–1745), appeared in a number of his engavings and paintings....
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The Woman in Gold: battle for Klimt's art
The film Woman in Gold, directed by Simon Curtis, was about the recovery of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I 1907. Gustav Klimt 1862-1918 (Moritz Bleibtreu)’s finished portrait painting,...
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Vermeer, Delft and the new globalisation of the 17th century
No nation was as interested in domestic genre scenes as the post-Reformation Dutch. The Dutch middle class wanted small, realistic images of their own life, images where education,...
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Neil Simon: a very special American playwright, screenwriter and author.
I have two important reasons for focusing on Neil Simon. Firstly my family life seemed to replicate his: Russian parents, Jewish, Yiddish-speaking, impoverished in the Great Depression and very keen on...
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Edvard Munch, Norwegian meteorology and mental ill health
Leon Black, Chairman and chief executive of Apollo Global Management, was apparently inspired in his love of art by his mother and his aunt, Manhattan art dealer Grace Borgenicht Brandt. Leon’s...
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Milos Forman, a top quality Czech-American director.
Jan Tomas Forman was born in 1932 in Caslav, now part of the Czech Republic. During the Nazi occupation, Forman's Protestant mother Anna Švábová died in Auschwitz in 1943. As a member of the...
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Why did America's Republican Party lurch to the right, and the Democrats...
Over the past 150 years, The Republican Party/Grand Old Party moved from a racially progressive, Northern party.. to one that that dominates the South and gets almost no support from non-white...
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From the North West Mounted Police (1873) to the Royal Canadian Mounties
In 1870, the vast area called Rupert's Land was transferred from the Hudson's Bay Company and purchased by the new Dominion of Canada. The sudden shift of authority and resultant uncertainty among the...
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How did King Ludwig II of Bavaria really die in 1886??
Born in Nymphenburg Castle Munich, Ludwig (1845-1886) was a member of the Wittelsbach dynasty. He became King Ludwig II of Bavaria in 1864 at 18 when his father died, but alas for the Bavarians,...
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