Tag Archives: History

... her real ambition was to go to the Congo, and that was where she went next ...

John Kelly’s The Great Mortality is one of those works that proves history can be a wonderful read and not merely a dry recounting of events and dates. The Great Mortality is subtitled “An Intimate History of the Black Death.” Intimate accurately describes how Kelly tells the story. In Kelly’s …

Escaping difficult family circumstances, Joseph Quitman Johnson enlisted in the US army at the age of fourteen and was stationed with the 31st Infantry in the Philippines in April 1941. After Pearl Harbor, his coming-of-age adventure turned into a nightmare of combat and suffering. Johnson survived shelling and hand-to-hand combat, …

Early Australian history is usually told as a male-dominated story, and it is remarkable how often this is a story of male failure – Burke and Wills et al. The women who do appear are usually painted in lurid colours as prostitutes and slatterns, or as the odd lonely, isolated …

In the second volume of the memoirs of Jill Ker Conway, first female president of Smith College, she has just arrived in America. She starts off being perhaps unsurprisingly gushy about Harvard, after Fifties Sydney: “Within weeks I began to see myself as perfectly normal, like all the other lively …

Aroma begins with an idea that pulled me up short: Smell is a cultural, hence a social and historical, phenomenon.

Just discovered the writer Thomas Burke, through a random selection at the London Library of his The London Spy, 1922. It is a wander around the streets, with a strong focus on the East End and the seamier sides of life, typical of his work – in fact he was …

I’ve never really gotten into the Mona Lisa; its iconic status seems so much a matter of historical accident rather than any reflection on its merits, and trying to see it in the Louvre is such a scramble that it hardly seems worth the effort. But I was fascinated to …

Hello To All That: A Memoir of War, Zoloft, and Peace recounts in time-shifting chapters the author’s depression, pharmaceutical cure, and subsequent formative experience as a freelance war correspondent reporting from the siege of Sarajevo in 1993-4. The parallel stories are interesting and vividly told. But readers expecting something heavy, …

Michael Grandage’s production of Don Carlos in London entirely justifies the “stunning” blurb. It is an 18th-century play by Friedrich Schiller, of whom I must confess I had not previously heard. The play is stunning – the plots, the twists, the betrayals, the sheer drama is up there with Macbeth, …