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Women's domestic labour, in Edwardian art
Frances Vida Lahey (1882-1968) studied painting at the Brisbane Technical College. In her early 20s (1905–09), she travelled south to Melbourne and studied at the National Gallery School with Bernard...
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Some British women got the vote in 1918! Thank you, New Zealand and Australia!
The dates re suffrage across Europe are telling. Switzerland introduced universal male suffrage in 1848, the same year as it came to France. Danish voting rights came to men 30+ of good reputation...
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Anni Albers at the Tate: Bauhaus and American textile designer
Annelise Fleischmann (1899-1994) started studying at the Bauhaus School of Art and Design in 1922. Bauhaus was a newly opened educational institution in Germany, combatting the despair and unemployment...
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Dr William Palmer - did he use strychnine in his mass murders?
Propelled by the bizarre murder story of Burke and Hare, I became interested in the equally bizarre story of William Palmer (1824-56) who studied medicine in London, and qualified in Aug 1846. He...
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An amazing World Fair in Tel Aviv 1934
Organised by the Trade and Industry Co, through a private initiative of three businessmen, a small Tel Aviv Fair did attract attention in the 1920s. It all began at the Zionist Club on Rothschild...
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Did the Bayeux Tapestry prove the existence of a lost Aryan master race?
William Duke of Normandy defeated Anglo-Saxon King Harold II at the battle of Hastings in Oct 1066, a triumph famously recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry. Duke William became the first Norman king of...
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Historic Krakow
After my late father retired from engineering, he bought a travel agency and travelled the world. My late mother was still a practising journalist back then and she travelled with him. I have used...
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Russian Tea Room, New York
I loved the Russian Tea Room in New York. But knew nothing of its origins until I read Daytonian in Manhattan. Young John Pupke left his native Germany in 1845 and worked in a coffee firm in New York....
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Did Trump pervert "The American Dream"?
James Truslow Adams (1878-1949) was a wealthy American who decided to leave banking and go into writing. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his series on New England history 1921–26. And his Epic of...
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Syria's Dr Bashar al-Assad: life saver or mass killer? Guest post
Bashar al-Assad was born in Damascus in 1965, the second oldest son of Hafez al-Assad. Father Hafez was born to a poor rural family of Shiite Alawite background who rose through the Ba'ath Party ranks...
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Who was the real Jack the Ripper: 1888?
I will reprint three theories from The Ripper of our night mares: theories about Jack the Ripper’s identity, by Professors Anne-Marie Kilday and David Nash. Then I will add a fourth theory that...
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Shaun Greenhalgh, a talented British art faker
After publishing a post on American forger Mark Landis, I read the book A Forger's Tale: The memoir of one of Britain's most successful and infamous art forgers by Shaun Greenhalgh (Allen &...
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British musical theatre - Little Tich
By the 1870s and 80s, British musical theatre creators like Gilbert and Sullivan could make a good living. And Music Hallbecame even more popular late in the C19th. The big stars were so successful...
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The Peter Norman Story - hero athlete or rebel?
I read The Peter Norman Story by Andrew Webster and Matt Norman (published by Pan Macmillan, 2018) and found it both powerful and sad. Peter Norman (1942-2006) grew up in a close-knit, Salvation Army...
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Hotel National Moscow: Tsarist, Soviet and modern Russian refinement
The pre-revolutionary Hotel National Moscow was financed by The Varvarinskoe Joint-Stock Company of Householders and designed by architect Alexander Ivanov. Construction began in 1901 and the...
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Dundee City waterfront and its new V & A Museum
The V & A had no museums or galleries of its own outside London. Instead it worked with a small number of partner organisations in Sheffield, Dundee and Blackpool to provide a regional presence....
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Al Capone, total gangster or partial humanitarian?
By the late C19th there were a few soup kitchens in American cities. But soup kitchens became urgently required only in the Great Depression (caused by the stock market crash in Oct 1929). The American...
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Summarising the first 10 years of "Art and Architecture, mainly"
The first post in this blog appeared on the 21/11/2008.And so far, 1128 posts have been published,read by 3 million.Readers have come from the following countries:1.USA2.Australia3.Germany4.United...
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Border walls are brutal, obscenely costly, fatal and even ineffective - Dr...
Elisabeth Vallet noted that at the end of the Cold War there were just 15 walls delimiting national borders; today, with 70 of them in existence around the world, the border wall has become the new...
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An American "princess" married into the Greek royal family!
Who were the American "princesses" who moved to Britain? The charming Caton sisters grew up in Baltimore, children of a wealthy merchant family. These young Americans had the money and they were...
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