Category Archive: HISTORY
National Portrait Gallery
(Canberra, August 2017) Having breasted the paint-stripping wind blowing down the mountain and off Lake Burley Griffin, we wondered if this monument would rise to emblematise a great reference of images, or just amount to a pantheon of nonentities crowding Our Island Story? Actually, the galleries are small, but occasionally choice, and sometimes a laugh riot. Little hordes of schoolchildren swept through on the hour (Canberra’s array of free stuff means almost every week there’s opportunity for a teaching free day or two) and little lessons were delivered by earnest folks who knew not what they were saying. Fortunately, P was…
Continue Reading →Zulu
"The Defence of Rorke's Drift" by Alphonse de Neuville (1879-90)
(Dir. Cy Endfield) (1963) This episode in the Anglo-Zulu War pitted some 4,500 against about 150, which shows how important fortifications (strategically useless) can be tactically decisive. The film is a pretty good treatment of the heroic skirmish, in which 11 Victorian Crosses were garnered, and great and good actors display stiff upper lips on both sides: we single out for praise Stanley Baker as the leader of the British defence (a much nicer role than his slimy turn in Accident), Michael Caine as the second in command, the wonderfully named Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead… …Nigel Green as the stern, stout Colour-Sergeant,…
Continue Reading →The Night of the Murdered Poets
August 12th: Like those who brook no argument, Sinning, call others to repent And lash the ones who speak their mind, Put-out eyes of the hopeless blind, So they shout-down common verse And let the imp of the perverse, Shred the words still warm on lips: Let books slip from fingertips. Hating all who think wrong things Their toxic torment a gift which brings More torture still, more calumny For the straw-stuffed enemy. So they charged the poets with Treason and rhyme; they chose to live Through words that carried truth revealed And strove and sought, refused to yield. They hanged them high…
Continue Reading →The Poet Obama
"Who are you, really?"
Barack Obama (born 4 August 1961) President Obama was a real smoothie, His act seemed straight out of a movie, He’d gaze at crowds to gauge their awe, Say “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” You moved, so he slapped a tax on thee, Regulated to a halt, then a subsidy Was wielded at the end of the nation’s rope, Thus proving the audacity of hope. “There has never been anything false about hope” A self-serving virtue, a dog-tired trope. From the Levant we do a moonlight flit, “Change will not come if we wait for it.” He swaggered,…
Continue Reading →A Place of Greater Safety
"Louis must die so that the nation may live." (Robespierre by Louis-Léopold Boilly)
(by Hilary Mantel) (1992) “No law be left but the will of a prevailing force.” Thus Edmund Burke (1790) on the French Revolution; which pretty well sums it up. Whilst the revolution did send shock waves throughout the Monarchical world, at least for a time, it merely reflected the ripples that wash over any society that lacks broad consent as to its mores, or, alternately, lacks a ruler with sufficient iron in the fist. The Terror was all the more terrifying because of its instability; the hands that signed the death warrants one night couldn’t scratch their heads the next day….
Continue Reading →