Category Archive: HISTORY
“Who Owns the Past?”
John Bray Oration by Geoffrey Robertson QC, Adelaide University, April 2, 2019 In a very interesting, and only slightly windy, lecture, Robertson QC gave us a very entertaining and erudite exegesis on both South Australia’s Periclean Chief Justice of the 1970s, Dr John Jefferson Bray QC, and the vexed and more immediate question of title to ancient artefacts, a subject close to TVC‘s heart. This is a topic that evokes much chest-beating and arm-waving. But take the Elgin (or Parthenon) Marbles, one of the more contentious works of art subject to a claim by the Government of Greece (it now…
Continue Reading →Skandalkonzert – Music with Punch
March 31, 1931: A concert at the Vienna Concert Society by the ‘atonalists,’ Schoenberg, Berg, inter alios, ended part-way through when fights broke out. It was a bit like the scene in No Surrender when a punk band comes out to entertain old age pensioners at a New Years Eve dance hall. Concert organizer Erhard Buschbeck punched a man out: a witness described it as “the most harmonious sound at the entire concert.” The show closed during Alban Berg’s “Five Orchestral Songs on Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg.” Mahler’s contribution to the programme, the best of the bunch by far,…
Continue Reading →George H. W. Bush
(12 June 1924 to 30 November 2018) Born in Massachusetts, educated at Yale, after flying for the navy in World War II, he became part of the Texas Oil industry, and a lifelong Republican. With experience in Congress, the Diplomatic Corp. and Intel, he was a steady second-in-command to the more flamboyant Reagan, and an obvious choice as his successor to the presidency. He oversaw the end of the Cold War, clipped Saddam Hussein’s wings (but crucially, drew back to allow that dictator to stay in place, ensuring an uneasy balance of power in the Middle East), and was generally…
Continue Reading →Tutankhamun’s Tomb Desecrated
26 November, 1922 at Luxor: the antechamber to Tutankhamun’s tomb is found, and the tomb is “officially” inspected the following day. Carter wrote: “Slowly, desperately slowly it seemed to us as we watched, the remains of the passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway were removed until at last we had the whole door clear before us. The decisive moment had arrived. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner. Darkness and blank space, as far as an iron testing-rod could reach, showed that whatever lay beyond was empty, and not…
Continue Reading →Face It, Western Civilisation: You Lost
“It’s Time”, to borrow an old political phrase, Last Orders for Western Civilisation and its running dogs, time even for soldiers in the cause to lay down their easels, quills, violins, compasses and chisels. You got beat – not by folks who were smarter (quelle idée!) or had a worthier plan. They had simply worked-out O’Brien’s dictum that hate was not more exhausting than love. In fact, it could be spread more evenly, calibrated and cadenced, and thus more effective over time. They understood that destruction is an essential part of the human condition and that righteous destruction is virtually…
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