Category Archive: HISTORY
Hello and Absolve all Black & Tans
"Have a nice day, Ireland!"(Portrait by Peter Lely)
Happy St Patrick’s Day! If Pátraic was so hot though, why does Ireland still have to put up with Sinn Féin? Anyway, top of the morning to Paddys everywhere, and we hope not to have been too inflammatory by passing-on the best wishes of well known hibernophile, Oliver Cromwell. The more polite Irish tend to refer to Oliver as a “Special Occasion.”* [*euphemism with apologies to the late Elisabeth Wynhausen.]
Continue Reading →Gandhi’s Tax Revolt
No fries with this salt
On this day in 1930, Mahatma Gandhi started his long march to Dandi on the sea to collect some salt for himself. This seemingly innocuous act was illegal at the time – the salt tax in India brought in lots of cash in olden times for the East India Company and now for the English King. A hundred thousand Indians joined Gandhi along the 400 kilometre walk. On arrival, Gandhi stooped and gathered some grains of salt, a gesture that would lead to his arrest, and presage the doom of the British Raj. It seems the Tommys had forgotten the reaction that stems from…
Continue Reading →The Hitler Club
(by Gary Gumpl and Richard Kleinig) (2007) It’s not easy being a Kraut. Hitler saw to that. He took more than two thousand years of German contributions to the world – legacies from sources such as Beethoven, Bonhoeffer, Brahms, Charlemagne, Marlene Dietrich, Dürer, Einstein, Friedrich, Goethe, Hesse, Hoffmann, Kant, Kleist, Liebniz, Luther, Mann, Mozart, Schiller, Schubert, and yes, Wagner (especially Wagner) – and sullied them, perhaps for ever. The ‘don’t mention the war’ running joke in that Fawlty Towers episode is closer to the truth than we care to admit. In modern Germany especially, the shadow cast by Nazism is long. Grotesque irony abounded in the Nazis’ world. For example, Himmler rattled around in a special train…
Continue Reading →Ruskin’s Rocks
John Ruskin (8 February 1819 to 20 January 1900) was one of the last great aesthetes. He was a hugely influential critic and the first Slade Professor of Fine Art. His best pronouncements come from the near invincible confidence he had in his own taste – later events, such as a barren marriage and a nasty libel suit, destroyed that early assurance. But he retained the sensible aesthetic view that “Taste is not only a part and an index of morality – it is the ONLY morality.”* He took advantage of his…
Continue Reading →Raffles in the Midday Sun
6 February 1819 – Thomas Stamford Raffles founded Singapore, continuing a long tradition of the English craze for islands. His short and fairly honourable life is commemorated in the form of that wonderful colonial edifice, Raffles Hotel. The grand relic is a welcome piece of high colonial style amid the relentless humidity, the pungent aroma of durians, the post-modern Singapore of Orchard Road, ‘Planet Hollywood’, ‘Starbucks,’ a Marriott done-up as a thirty-storey pagoda, the clean and un-cerebral Sentosa Island, the welcoming hands of merchants just waiting to grab you and drag you into their shop…
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