Well, I’ve finished Richard Holmes’s Shelley:The Pursuit. I didn’t find it as gripping as his superb biography of Coleridge, but it became more enjoyable as it went along. Mainly, I think, because Shelley became much more likeable as he matured personally, politically and poetically. Not that he became less radical, or completely lost the restlessness [...]
Posts tagged with ‘history’
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Shelley update
22 August 2006 – 12:28 pm
I’m still reading the Shelley biography. Remarkably, his personal life seems to have stabilised somewhat, I suspect mainly because his grandfather died and so, while the exact terms of the legacy are still with the lawyers, he’s not actually having to hide from the bailiffs any more.
The chances of his life running smooth are reduced [...]
Shellier than thou
18 August 2006 – 10:51 am
I didn’t mention in the last post that, as well as the two elopements, Shelley has been shot at by a Welsh ghost, is under observation by the government because of his seditious publications, and is going extravagantly into debt in expectation of an inheritance from a family which has disowned him.
Was there ever a [...]
Shelley, Shellier, Shelliest.
17 August 2006 – 8:49 pm
I’m reading a biography of Percy Bysshe. An interesting and talented man, but perhaps just a wee bit erratic; he’s just eloped for the second time, abandoning his first wife and their new child in order to run off with a 16-year-old. And her sister. And he’s still only 21.
Rough Crossings by Simon Schama
22 July 2006 – 11:55 am
During the American War of Independence, the British promised freedom and land to any slaves who left their masters and served with the British. Many thousands did so, and after the war they were taken first to Nova Scotia and then settled in a colony in Sierra Leone. This book tells that story.
Among the slaves [...]
17th century fly-by
7 July 2006 – 2:16 pm
A cool thing from the people at Digitally Distributed Environments:
See the whole panorama here.
Rembrandt’s Eyes by Simon Schama
3 July 2006 – 12:41 pm
I’ve only read two books by Schama; Citizens, his book about the French Revolution, and this biography of Rembrandt. Both have been excellent. They’re also quite hard work simply because he’s so thorough. Thoroughness is no doubt a virtue in a historian, but it does make for large books. Rembrandt’s Eyes is frankly too large [...]
Big Chief Elizabeth
28 May 2006 – 12:48 am
I just read Big Chief Elizabeth – How England’s Adventurers Gambled and Won the New World, by Giles Milton. As the title suggests, it’s an account of the earliest attempts to set up an English settlement in America. As the title also suggests, the general tone of the thing is ‘rollicking yarn’ rather than ‘nuanced [...]
Birds, history and stuff
24 March 2006 – 4:21 pm
When I started planning a trip to Andalucía, I posted a message to BirdForum asking whether my plans were practical. One of the people who replied was John Butler, who, I’ve since discovered, not only runs bird tours there but actually wrote the book on birding in the area. One of the things he said [...]
mock-mock
11 March 2006 – 1:06 am
I went to an event at City Hall today, the details of which shall be revealed on Sunday. City Hall is right next to Tower Bridge, and I was thinking what a strange thing it is: a Gothic mechanised bridge. Particularly since the Victorians didn’t obviously erect such things in a spirit of fun or [...]
I’m back.
4 September 2005 – 10:43 pm
I’ve come back from Perigord to the grim news from New Orleans. I don’t really have anything to say about that, for the moment.
I did manage to listen to the cricket on Radio4 LW via a buzzy little radio. I ended up having to hold it out of an upstairs window and nearly had [...]
Nelsoniana
22 August 2005 – 11:08 am
It seems extraordinary now that I found history so boring at school. I don’t know whether it was bad teaching, bad textbooks, or just that it’s one of those things that grows on you with age. Part of it is realising that you don’t have to read history books to learn about history - that [...]
Slavery monument
16 August 2005 – 2:24 pm
There was a documentary on TV last night (which I forgot to watch) in which Dr Robert Beckford argued the case for the government to pay reparations for slavery. What I’ve gathered from the web is: he consulted “an economic historian, a compensation lawyer and an expert on loss of earnings” and came up with [...]
‘Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson’ by Paula Byrne
12 June 2005 – 12:39 pm
I picked up Perdita at the airport on the way to Egypt. It’s the biography of Mary Robinson, who was an actress, the most beautiful and fashionable woman in London, who became famous as the mistress of the Prince of Wales (and later Charles Fox and Colonel Tarleton, among others). Then, after she developed rheumatic [...]
‘Blood and Roses’, ‘Being in Being’, ‘Don Quixote’
14 May 2005 – 5:59 pm
some thoughts on Blood and Roses, Being in Being, and Don Quixote
I recently finished Don Quixote (the new Edith Grossman translation). I read about half of it in my teens, before getting sidetracked, and decided that the 400th anniversary was a good time to have another go at it.
DQ is a great idea for a [...]