03 Thursday May 2018
Posted in Poetry
I’ve been musing on first favourite poems – and, after some consideration, I’ve come to the conclusion that my first favourite poem must have been Giovanni Pascoli’s Alexandros. Which is a tad strange because, as a rule, I don’t enormously like Pascoli – a late 19th/early 20th century Italian poet with a rather pathetic vein, only saved, in my admittedly biased view, by a keen interest in history.
Narrative poems, you know. Stories – the usual obsession. Continue reading
19 Thursday Jan 2017
Some more Julius Caesar, do you mind?
The fact is that, because of Shakespeare in Words, I had a special thrill when, in Act 3.I, the conspirators bathe their hands in dead Caesar’s blood – half barbaric ritual, half preparation to face the angry and upset crowds outside. Very much like actors before a play, they plan to appear with bloody hands and swords, shouting “Peace, freedom, and liberty.” Continue reading
16 Tuesday Aug 2016
Tags
I told you about Bryher’s The Player’s Boy, didn’t I?
Well, to this lovely, melancholy novel my Paris Press edition adds a wonderful afterword, consisting of a letter that Bryher wrote to a friend to explain her fascination with Elizabethan literature and history. It’s a charming little piece about growing up, reading, cultivating one’s imagination, finding strength in literature and history, and being slightly eccentric… It’s well worth reading in its entirety.
My favourite part, though, has to be the final musing on the historian’s perspective: Continue reading
21 Tuesday Jun 2016
Tags
anachronism, English language, historical thesaurus, History, Oxford Thesaurus, University of Glasgow, writing
Do you know the Historical Thesaurus of English?
It’s a project of the University of Glasgow, providing information on the history of nearly 800000 words. It… Continue reading
21 Saturday May 2016
Posted in History
A little Saturday thought, from Milan Kundera’s The Curtain.
Something about history, and truth, and what – and how – is remembered or forgotten.
Something that goes very well with my own pet theory about the iridescence of history…
Says Kundera:
This is the most obvious thing in the world: man is separated from the past (even from the past only a few seconds old) by two forces that go instantly to work and cooperate: the force of forgetting (which erases) and the force of memory (which transforms).
It is the most obvious thing, but it is hard to accept, for when one thinks it all the way through, what becomes of all the testimonies that historiography relies on? What becomes of our certainties about the past, and what becomes of History itself, to which we refer every day in good faith, naively, spontaneously? Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable (there is no doubt that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo), stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the exaggerated, the misconstrued, an infinite realm of nontruths that copulate, multiply like rats, and become immortal.
A realm that, I might add, makes for wonderful hunting grounds, when you happen to write historical fiction…
23 Saturday Jan 2016
Can you read French? If not, you may want to rely on some online translator, just this once, because Hervé Dumont’s Encyclopédie du film historique – that is, the encyclopedia of historical films, is a real treasure trove.
Right now, I think that all you can find in English is the Author’s Note, explaining what and why. Amongst other things, you’ll find that Swiss film historian Dumont quotes Stanley Kubrick’s notion that “one of the things the cinema knows how to do better than any of the other arts, is to bring to the screen historical subjects.” Continue reading
26 Thursday Nov 2015
For some reason, The Hessian Renegades put me in mind of William Shakespeare Burton’s The Wounded Cavalier.
Burton, who bore the names he bore because of the Bard, was an English painter in the XIXth Century, and the Wounded Cavalier is perhaps his most famous work. My friend Marina shakes her head and sniggers whenever either author or painting are mentioned – by me, usually – because, she says, how can I like such an ugly painting?
Actually, it had its fans, back in the day – Ruskin being an especially vocal one. “Masterly”, he called it… Yes, well. I won’t be the one to deny that, whatever Ruskin had to say, TWC is a stagey affair, both stiff and sentimental… Continue reading
23 Tuesday Jun 2015
Posted in History
While reading this great post about the Egyptian Museum in Turin, I was assaulted by memories of my own about the place.
I was there only once, many years ago. Nearly thirty years ago, actually – which makes me feel considerably old. As a young girl I once spent a week in Turin with my parents. My father was there for Army reasons, and my mother and I tagged along, and were foisted upon a young officer*, who showed us around. Under his guidance we also visited the Egyptian Museum. The place was quite impressive – more than a little cave-like, with its cavernous rooms and scant lighting… I remember especially the great hall with its procession of statues emerging from the gloom, a glass case containing a pair of mummified hands the colour of parchment, and the haunting eyes of the Fayum mummy portraits. I was an easily spooked child, and I remember lying awake the night after the visit, thinking of those hands and eyes… 
And yet, the most lasting impression was made by something else. Something as small and ordinary as a loaf of bread. It had been put in a tomb, and resisted through several thousand years, and there it sat, in a glass case – one of several round, flat loaves, the sort you might find in any bakery to this day, still bearing the imprint of the hands that kneaded it…
I think I have already said that my love of history grew through a series of smaller and bigger epiphanies. Well, the Egyptian Loaf was one of them. I could imagine so well this long-dead baker kneading the dough, shaping it, baking it in the oven – just the way we do it, or as little differently as it makes no odd – and… Shall it sound dreadfully fanciful, if I say “and handing it to us, as if through a window across the millennia”? Because this is what it felt like, back then, in the cool, shady rooms of the Egyptian Museum in Turin. An overwhelming sense of things unchanged – or very little. A sudden sense of kinship with a dizzyingly distant past that, three decades later, still manages to give me a shiver.
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* I call him a young officer now, but back then he seemed quite old to me. He must have been in his thirties… Did I mention I’m feeling old at the moment?
23 Saturday May 2015
Posted in History
… And what is history? And what is fact? And what is perceived as history?
All hefty questions, that Derek Birks addresses in a thought-provoking manner Continue reading
14 Thursday May 2015
Tags
Barcelona, Byzantium, historical novel, historical sources, History, J.J. Norwich, Roger de la Flor, Steven Runciman
Many years ago, in the palace of the Ajuntament in Barcelona, I came across a set of fresco mural painting, showing how Catalan knight in shining armour Roger de la Flor, after generously saving the Byzantine Empire from some Turkish horde or other, was betrayed and murdered for his pains by the same Emperor he had saved… Bad Byzantines! Bad!
All very interesting – and yet… Continue reading
