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A sad goodbye to Australia's greatest creation - Holden cars
JA Holden & Co was first established in Adelaide in 1856 by James Holden as a leather and saddlery business. Henry Adolph Frost joined as a business partner in 1885, and the company was renamed...
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1919: race riots in Chicago
1919 was a landmark year in many countries, for both good and bad. Consider Amritsar Massacre of 1919 - did it end the British Raj? The Versailles Peace Treaty (1919) was doomed to fail and A separate...
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Prince Edward and his first mistress, Marguerite Alibert
Marguerite Alibert (1890-1971) was born in Paris to working class parents. Young Marguerite was blamed for not having watched her baby brother properly so as a punishment, her parents sent her to the...
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Guy Burgess and the Cambridge spy ring
At the University of Cambridge in the 1930s, Guy Burgess (1911-63) was in a group of upper middle-class students who believed that capitalism could never be democratic and that Germany, USA and UK were...
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Wassily Kandinsky - artist and art theorist
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was born in Moscow, and spent his childhood in Odessa, fostered by a relative. In high school he learned to play the piano and cello. Then he enrolled at the Moscow...
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At last ... the Charter of the United Nations, 1945
President Woodrow Wilson helped create the League of Nations post-WW1 at the Versailles Conference June 1919. But the US Senate rejected membership and the U.S withdrew into isolation. As Europe...
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The medieval Voynich Manuscript - chaos in academe!
Wilfrid Voynich (1865–1930) was born into an aristocratic Polish-Lithuanian family and became an anti-Czarist activist and bibliophile. After being arrested, he was sent to Siberia and eventually...
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Berners Tavern: the most beautiful art restaurant in London
London Edition was initially built as a five Georgian townhouses in the classical style in 1835 before its conversion into Berners Hotel in 1909. Right at the peak of the splendid Edwardian era,...
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Ernest Hemingway and his love of bull fighting
The Ernest Hemingway works I read or saw in film were The Sun Also Rises (1926), Farewell to Arms (1929), To Have and Have Not (1937), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and The Old Man and the Sea...
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Memorialising the pandemic: Venice and Melbourne
William Aslet wrote that every July in Venice a pontoon bridge is constructed between St Mark’s Square and the Church of The Redentore/Redeemer on Giudecca Island. This Festa del Redentore ceremony is...
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Crown Heights Riots (1991) and the Australian Rosenbaum brothers
The Crown Heights Riots of 1991 came two years after other high-profile racial incidents in New York, including a fatal attack on a young black man in Bensonhurst, and the beating-rape of a white...
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A reading guide during lockdown ... well recommended novels
I have selected my best recommendations from Reading's Summer Reading List and one from History Today.LOVE IS BLIND by Scottish author William Boyd. The book has finely wrought characters and wonderful...
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Dame Barbara Cartland - her many books and men
Born in Birmingham, Barbara Cartland (1901–2000) was the oldest child of British Army Major James Cartland (died 1918); her mother's family were Gloucestershire minor landed gentry. Barbara had two...
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Countess Raine Spencer and her step-daughter, Princess Diana
I am not a royalist so it may have seemed strange watching Channel 4’s documentary Princess Diana’s Wicked Step-mother. This film, about Raine Spencer (1929-2016) and her relationship with the...
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17th century Spanish artist responded to a pandemic - Bartolomé Esteban Murillo
A crucial commission in the mid-1640s for the Franciscan monastery in Seville established Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s reputation, to the extent that Murillo displaced Zurbaran as the key Seville...
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Charles Lindbergh: national hero, flawed human or both?
August Lindbergh (1859–1924) was born in Sweden & left for the USA early in life. As a teen, his son Charles Lindbergh (1902-74) loved machines, especially the family’s Model T Ford. And The...
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Important medicine chests at Florence Nightingale Museum, London
We know that medicine chests filled with bottles of herbal remedies and medicines were purchased by affluent families for domestic use from apothecaries in Britain in the C18th-C19th. These chests...
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Joseph Eichler's stunning Californian property development
Joseph Eichler (1900-74) was born in New York in 1900, son of German Jewish immigrants. He grew up in a politically liberal family who admired Pres Franklin Roosevelt, and grew to maturity in NY’s...
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Helen Reddy singer - heroic, Australian and feminist
Helen Lamond Reddy was born in Melbourne in 1941 to comedy actor-producer Max Reddy & singer Stella Lamond, and half sister to the famous performer, Toni Lamond.In such a show-biz family, young...
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I love you Tom Lehrer: your music, social criticism and maths
Tom Lehrer (born 1928-) grew up in Manhattan, the son of a Jewish clothes manufacturer. While at primary school, he started learning classical piano at 7. Later he moved towards more contemporary...
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