Category Archive: HISTORY
American Visions
Copley could paint a nice lady; couldn't paint a shark
(Robert Hughes) (1997) Hughes was one of those big, bold, Jesuitical, learned men of the arts whom we sorely need and miss. This book, and the series on which it is based, is crammed with Hughes’ invariably wise, precise and yet loving take on American Art. He took up a role as Time’s art critic in 1970 and those who are old enough to have actually read Time recall his brilliant and generally fair opinions on the world of contemporary art. This wonderful review is as good as his seminal The Shock of the New but wiser and less hurried. If you…
Continue Reading →Death Cloud Over Pompeii
"The Last Day(s) of Pompeii" (Karl Briullov, 1827-33)
(Pompeii, AD 79) On a pleasant warm day, a soft breeze soughing through the pines, we chugged on a local caboose through Campania from Sorrento to Pompeii. Buried under a massive blanket of ash and pumice from the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79, only uncovered in 1750, ruins remain but ruins of startling length and breadth, including extant frescoes, streets and buildings, and corpses. Pliny the Younger was a 17 year old and described in a letter how some of his family’s land went up in smoke (initially in a cloud of vapours, shaped like a pine tree) along with his uncle, who died attempting…
Continue Reading →Magna Carta (800)
"You want me to HONOUR this scrap of paper?"
On 15 June, 1215, at Runnymede, a reluctant King John, under coercion from unruly barons and the ruly Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘signed up’ to Magna Carta. John was a crafty bastard: a couple of years earlier, with French wolves at the door, the King submitted to Papal authority and bought himself some miraculous breathing space. That summer morning in 1215, the King rode to the meadow, absorbed the terms and agreed on the spot. He needed time (again) and may have not intended to comply. John was dead (of dysentery – ecch!) by the next year, and by then, no one was getting specific…
Continue Reading →Essence of Dick
"Let Me Make Something Perfectly Clear" (1970 photo of Nixon by Jack E Kightlinger)
“A place in the national firmament… Greatness is more than government. To make exciting mischief or dull salt; Hazard the chance of ruin, lay on fault, Set the highest stakes through piracy But who the hell to handle it, to cut free; To build me a mad image, up to anything Other than domestically, one who’ll thus bring A welcome beard. Under my dark sun, hold hard! The one you serve was dealt the bleakest card.” (What serves power, if one’s form at flood Is splendidly bedight yet daubed with mud? And the ‘new King’…
Continue Reading →Mad King Ludwig
The Moon King
June 13, 1886: what happened? Ludwig II King of Bavaria, son of Crown Prince Maximilian and grandson of Ludwig I, died mysteriously that summer day in Lake Starnberg, Bavaria. If he was mad, he was our kind of mad. But he was also a threat, and this is why his ‘death by drowning’ has serious questions hanging over it – he was found floating, with his asylum doctor (also dead) near the shore, in shallow water, no water in the lungs, and he was a strong swimmer. As accidental drownings go, it has as much cogency as the water commissioner’s in…
Continue Reading →