The “state of siege” on which Lenin insisted with such energy requires “full powers”. The practice of organised distrust demands an iron hand. The system of Terror is crowned by a Robespierre. Comrade Lenin reviewed the members of the Party in his mind, and reached the conclusion that this iron hand could [...]
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Pauline Viardot: Soprano, Muse and Lover
Enchantress of Nations is the biography of a 19th-century opera singer, but I cannot call it an opera biography and I hope opera haters won’t be instantly put off by the subject matter. Firstly, much of the time it seems as much a biography of Ivan Turgenev as of Viardot [...]
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Posted in Entries by Jackie, Non-fiction: biography, Non-fiction: history, Non-fiction: nature, tagged astronomy, planets, Poland, Renaissance, science, space on June 2, 2008 | 4 Comments »
It is fitting that on the weekend in which the Phoenix landed on Mars that I was reading a book about Copernicus, the Father of modern astronomy. If “modern” can be said to start in the early 1500’s. Copernicus was the man who established that the planets moved around the sun and that Earth [...]
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Posted in Entries by Moira, Non-fiction: biography, Non-fiction: history, Non-fiction: sociology, tagged Bazalgette, Bell Rock, Brooklyn Bridge, Deborah Cadbury, Hoover Dam, Industrial Revolution, Seven Wonders on May 23, 2008 | 9 Comments »
Hands up everyone who’s ever really liked a television series, bought the TV tie-in book and then, having thumbed through it once, never looked at it again - or worse, found that it added nothing to the series and was in fact just money down the drain.
Yes. Thought so. A not uncommon [...]
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Almost everything everyone thinks they know about King Alfred is wrong.
Let’s just run through a quick checklist:
He was the first king of all England - Wrong.
He created the Navy - Wrong.
He invented the jury system - Wrong.
He burned the cakes - Wrong.
In fact, the man voted by the British public into the top 20 of [...]
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Posted in Entries by Moira, Non-fiction: biography, Non-fiction: history, Non-fiction:art, Uncategorized, tagged Impressionists, Manchester, L S Lowry, Claude Monet, Adolphe Valette on January 2, 2008 | 6 Comments »
No-one knows for sure why Pierre Adolphe Valette left his native France for England. The best guess is that he was following in the footsteps of his “god”, Claude Monet, who travelled to London at the onset of the Franco-Prussian War and subsequently made many return visits.
Valette however did not stay in London, [...]
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Memoirs are not necessarily a good idea. At least, it’s often a bad idea to read them if you don’t want your worst impressions to be confirmed. I’ve never fully signed up to the cult of Neruda; his poetry always left me with an oddly antipathetic feeling, even though I could hear that powerful eloquent [...]
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Wollstonecraft, Imlay, Godwin - for a young unmarried woman, dead at twenty-two, Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter Fanny had many names. It seems to be in fashion these days to write biographies of people who might be termed ‘historically insignificant’; usually such biographies try desperately to milk these lives for all the drama and passion they’re [...]
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