Category Archive: HISTORY
“Give us a Boating Tune, Fred!”
17 July, 1717: Handel’s “Water Music” is played on the Thames for King George I. He went for Baroque on the river. As Michael Steen* points out, the story that Handel “tried to regain the King’s favour by serenading him, uninvited, is untrue: the music was written later.” Handel had to work at self-selling of course, who does not? But his success was surely due to his prolific output of dramatic effects and ingenious musical structures. For a man born (23 February 1685) in Halle, Handel became the quintessential composer for the English. His Zadok the Priest became the coronation…
Continue Reading →5 Reasons to Learn Ancient Greek – New Beginners’ Class!
As TVC devotees know, I am in my fifth year of Ancient (or, more properly, Classical) Greek at the WEA with Dr Alessandro Boria. Now, for the first time we will have a beginners’ class as well as the more advanced class. Here are 5 good reasons why you should sign up today to the new class:- Here are the first two reasons, which it is compulsory for us to recite – Learning a language develops and hones the brain – the older the language, the more ancient its roots in human thought and the better for the grey matter; You would…
Continue Reading →A Plague o’ Both Your Houses!
We are sped, and sick of you both: so bent out of shape with hate and ancient enmities… Israel We know the Jews can claim to be the first in Zion, a 3000 year-old legacy, and that whilst it was under Muslim rule since the 7th century, such others are more or less interlopers (Jerusalem gets 700 odd mentions in the Old Testament, none in the Qur’an), although for centuries the Holy Lands have been recognised as multi-faith. (There’s no particular reason to criticise President Trump’s incendiary move to locate the US Embassy in Jerusalem – being nice, polite and diplomatic doesn’t sizzle any…
Continue Reading →American Pharaoh
The Mayor at the opening of the Lake Front Festival, 1973, showing his sartorial flair
Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (by Adam Cohen & Elizabeth Taylor) (2000) What other book to buy in the south side of Chicago? TVC was only a few blocks from Bridgeport, where Richard J Daley lived and died, with his wife of five or so decades and 7 children, bog Irish and loyal to their neighbourhood to an insane degree, so loyal that they looked down on Irish families that moved to the suburbs, the ones so pretentious that they “had fruit in the house when nobody was sick,” Having selected this and one other book, TVC…
Continue Reading →Socialism as Religion
Be careful who you give awards to...the Reverend Jim Jones, 1977's Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian award winner
Born May 13 (1931), the Reverend Jim Jones is famous for his deep Christian-Socialist beliefs, his humanitarian impulses, his Peoples’ Temple in San Francisco where he organised leftist demonstrations, and of course, the workers’ paradise he established at Jonestown in Guyana. His passionate commitment to equality and fairness drew inspiration from thinkers such as Jesus, Buddha, Lenin, Marx, Castro and Mao, and won him kudos from the likes of well-known lib-labs Walter Mondale, Rosalynn Carter, Jerry Brown, and Harvey Milk (who called the Reverend “a man of the highest character.”) In any case, the socialist paradise shuddered to a halt…
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