I hope this finds everyone happy and well. I know, I know: another year, another newsletter… I don’t know if this is becoming a ritual now, but it’s nice to look back and remember what the year has brought me. I’ve been very grateful for the opportunity to write about a wider range of things... Continue Reading →
News: Engelsberg Ideas
I have a new piece up online for Engelsberg Ideas. It's a review of two fascinating new books: The Spiritual Adventure of Henri Matisse: Vence's Chapel of the Rosary by Charles Miller and The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Time by Virginia Chieffo Raguin. It was a privilege and a joy to write about them.
Einhard: historian, sinner, manlet
They must have looked odd together, the Frankish king and the courtier who later memorialised him. Charlemagne was tall for the period, around six foot three. Einhard meanwhile, his friend Walahfrid wrote, was “despicable in stature” – a “tiny manlet”, in Einhard’s own phrase. Born into a family of modest wealth, Einhard was educated at... Continue Reading →
Ovid in exile
Ovid was with a friend on Elba in the autumn of 8AD when the crisis broke. A summons arrived for him from the emperor, Augustus. Were the rumours true, his friend asked. Ovid equivocated, half confessing, half denying. Two millennia later, we still don’t know what had happened; we only know what happened next. Following... Continue Reading →
The Bonfire of the Vanities
‘Piagnoni’, they were sometimes called: the ‘weepers’. They were gangs of teenage boys and young men – mostly middle class – who patrolled the streets of Florence in the 1490s, hurling abuse at the impious – drunks, gamblers, women – and hurling stones too. They were called ‘pinzocheroni’, too: bigots. They, like the city, were... Continue Reading →
The crusade against the pagan north: Livonian Knights, the frozen Baltic and the Battle of Karuse
It wasn’t exactly a motto, but they liked it nonetheless. “The sword is our Pope,” the Livonian Knights said, “and it is a Pope that is never far from you.” Formerly known the Sword Brothers, the Livonian Knights were a military monastic order akin to the Knights Templar. They were founded around 1202 to bring... Continue Reading →
A Sikh uprising against the British Empire: the Kuka Revolt of 1872
Was it even a revolt? Afterwards, the government was doubtful. But in January 1872 the man on the ground in Punjab, deputy commissioner John Lambert Cowan, was sure. There had been unrest among the minority Namdhari Sikh population – ‘Kukas’, the British called them – in what was a Muslim region. The Muslim slaughter of... Continue Reading →
Belladonna, bonbons and murder: the strange case of 19th-century serial killer Marie Jeanneret
It wasn’t until June 1868, when 24-year-old Marie-Catherine Fritzgès fell ill at the Pension Desarzens in Geneva, that the authorities acted. It was much too late. Fritzgès had been befriended by a fellow guest, Marie Jeanneret, a nurse, herself only 32. Jeanneret poisoned her with atropine, a derivative of belladonna, deadly in large doses. Fritzgès... Continue Reading →
Plunder, profit and Protestantism: piracy in Elizabethan England
On 7 September 1592, the Madre de Dios was brought into the harbour at Dartmouth. Seven decks high and weighing some 1,600 tonnes, it was the largest ship England had ever seen. It was also the richest. Its hold was packed with luxury goods: silk, damask, taffeta, calico; carpets, quilts, canopies; pepper, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon;... Continue Reading →
Teddy Boys: Post-War Britain and the First Youth Revolution by Max Décharné
On Barnes Common in West London, one midnight in the early days of 1955, a policeman approached four men sitting in a parked car. They were wearing velvet-collared jackets, stovepipe trousers, bootlace ties and crepe-soled shoes. ‘Teddy Boys’, he thought to himself. “Now then you lot,” he told them. “Get weaving before I pinch you.”... Continue Reading →
News: History Today
My principal Months Past piece for the April issue of History Today is about 'Little Jack the Boy Missionary', who died, aged seven, on this day in 1889. It's up online here.
Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe by Sathnam Sanghera
It happened by accident. In 1829 the naturalist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward was trying to hatch a moth pupa. He placed it in a sealed glass container, along with some soil and dried leaves, and left it. Sometime later he was surprised to find that a fern and some grass had taken root in the soil... Continue Reading →
The invention and re-invention of St Nicholas
Saint Nicholas was dead, to begin with. On 6 December 343, to be precise, in Myra, in present-day Turkey. But, as is the way with saints, death was no hindrance to miracles. Indeed it was an accelerator. Myrrh flowed from his tomb from the moment of interment. Solving problems, giving gifts; that was what he... Continue Reading →
Caspar Hauser: the mystery of the foundling of Nuremberg
Who was Caspar Hauser? No-one knew. He stepped into the world in Nuremberg on Whit Monday in 1828 towards the end of the afternoon. A shoemaker in the Unschlitt Platz – named for the city’s nearby store of fat and tallow – saw him first. Hauser’s posture and gait caught the eye: he struggled to... Continue Reading →
Stations of the dead: London’s Necropolis railway
Death in the Victorian capital of the British Empire was problematic. “London graveyards are all bad,” the Board of Health reported gloomily, “differing only in degrees of badness”. There were 200 of them covering some 218 acres, yet by 1842 they were having to absorb over 50,000 new residents a year. “A London churchyard is... Continue Reading →
Palmares: an African refuge in South America
At first they were called ‘mocambo’: a word from the Mbundu of what is now Angola meaning ‘hideout’. They were communities of escaped slaves that began springing up in colonial Brazil in the 17th-century. Typically they might contain around fifty people, predominantly men. No less typically, the colonial powers – either the Dutch or the... Continue Reading →
The Gunfight at the OK Corral: reality, murder and myth
Gunfights and killings were news in Tombstone, Arizona but not headline news. One town paper had a regular column for such things titled ‘Death’s Doings’; the paper itself was mordantly named The Tombstone Epitaph. Not gallows humour exactly; trigger-finger humour, perhaps. Justice was rough to non-existent in the post-Civil War American south west. A bank... Continue Reading →
Saint Francis: memory, record and afterlife
Why you? It was a good question. Brother Masseo repeated it three times. What do you mean, Francis of Assisi asked him. “You aren’t a handsome man in body,” Masseo explained. “You aren’t someone of great learning, you’re not noble; so why does the whole world come after you?” Because, Francis said, there is no-one... Continue Reading →
John Goff Rand and the invention of Impressionism
Was it true, as Giorgio Vasari wrote in The Lives of the Artists, that oil painting was invented in the 15th century by Jan van Eyck – he calls him Giovanni da Bruggia – and brought to Italy by Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who traveled to Flanders to learn the secret of its making?... Continue Reading →
Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa by Anthony Grafton
Sometime in 1506, the Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius, stopped at a tavern in the German town of Gelnhausen. There he encountered Doctor Faustus - then going by the name of Georg Sabellicus - handing out what were in essence business cards. Faustus was, the cards said, “the chief of necromancers, an astrologer, the second magus,... Continue Reading →
How Ben Jonson escaped the gallows
The late 16th century was a precarious time to be involved in – or just to meet anyone involved in – the theatre. There was cash flow, of course. And the threat of closure, on either political or health-and-safety grounds. But there were other risks too. One of them was death. For a small group... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 