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A private palace of art - Leighton House in London
Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896) built the Kensington studio-house from 1865 on. With the Victorian art market booming, and domestic taste fascinating the middle classes, Leighton needed to...
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Queen Mary of Teck's biography and author James Pope-Hennessy's murder
Queen Victoria’s unsatisfactory grandson, Prince Albert Duke of Clarence, second in line to the British throne, desperately needed a bride. Earlier attempts to marry this useless duke off to foreign...
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Christian Dior designed beauty, ending wartime ugliness
By the time we were selecting our own clothes in the 1960s, the times were too hippy for my generation to tolerate Christian Dior (1905–1957)’s post-war fashions. But now it is time for us to...
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David Goldblatt: anti-apartheid photographer in South Africa
David Goldblatt (1930-2018) was born in South Africa, the grandson of Lithuanian refugees who fled their homeland in 1893. Goldblatt worked in his father's men's wear shop and graduated from the...
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The Klimt and Schiele film: 100 years since Austria's golden era
The film “Klimt and Schiele: Eros and Psyche, 1918-2018 - Scandals, Dreams, Obsessions in Vienna's Golden Age” analysed turn-of-the-century Vienna art. The film guided viewers through the Albertina,...
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The catastrophic pogrom in Kishinev (Russia 1903)
50,000 Jews lived in Kishinev (now Ukraine) in 1900, 46% of the total population. Kishinev was the 5th largest Jewish city in the Russian Empire city after Warsaw, Odessa, Lodz and Vilna. Thanks to the...
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Freddie Mercury and Queen; concerts records and films
Lesley-Ann Jones' biography, The Real Life of Freddie Mercury: Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mecury, revealed a brilliant musician keeping his true self hidden from an adoring world-wide...
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Deporting or imprisoning desperate refugees is a shame on all Australia
Over the years in this blog, I have tried to show how Australia’s most creative and productive citizens were once terrified refugees and migrants, forced out of their own countries and waiting to be...
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Clive James - eventual death, Sydney beaches and poetry
Born in Sydney, Clive James (1939- ) aka the Kid from Kogarah, remembered his childhood fondly. He grew up in an ordinary suburb near the beaches in Sydney. Buses from Kogarah serviced surrounding...
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Three Identical Strangers - a film review
Bobby Shafran drove to Sullivan County Community College in New York for his first day of university. The other students were thrilled to see him there, telling him how their summer holidays had been...
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Could the British have saved the Romanovs from execution?
We understand the very close connection among the three principal monarchs of the early C20th.1. British King George V and Russian Tsar Nicholas II’s mothers, Alexandra and Dagmar, were sisters, the...
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Worship of Hitler in an English Church, 1945
In Sept 1942, a lone plane dropped three bombs on Petworth in Sussex, one of them falling on a boys’ school. The bomber killed 29 school boys, a headmaster and schoolmistress in this daylight raid. The...
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How close was Salvador Dali to Sigmund Freud?
The main founder of the Surrealist movement and writer of the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 was André Breton (1896-1966). According to Breton in 1924, the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud...
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150 years celebrating St Pancras railway station, London
I love travelling on trains and ships, but not so much on planes. St Pancras is a C19th station that provides regional, inter-city, continental services to London. It is London’s second busiest railway...
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1905 - in art, science, films, Canadian confederation, Bengal partition and...
I normally think of the Edwardian era as time of culture, literature, science, medicine and peace. But 1905 began with a series of strikes and demonstrations in the Russian streets. In Jan a protest...
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"The Alfred Munnings: War Artist 1918" exhibition, Britain then Canada
I wanted to focus on WW1 anniversary exhibitions in this blog before the end of 2018. So today we will examine Canadian soldiers and horses in Europe, and next post we will examine animals in the...
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Australian soldiers in WW1 with their dogs etc
Animals made an important contribution to Australia’s military history during WW1. Homing pigeons were used as a communication tool: they were silent, difficult to intercept and not greatly affected...
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Endell St Military Hospital, London - run by women during WW1
WW1 hospitals were tough, partially because the conditions in which the medical staff had to tend to the terrible injuries were too crowded and poorly equipped. But necessity was the mother of...
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Avery Brundage: president of the American Olympic Committee
Avery Brundage (1887-1975) graduated civil engineering from the University of Illinois in 1909. His links to anti-Semitism were first seen in his university days, where he was president of a...
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Budapest was called the spa capital of the world.
It wasn’t until the Turkish occupation of Buda in the C16th that the ancient Roman springs were brought back to their former glory. In the Turkish era, three thermal baths were re-developed, connected...
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