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Index: History & Travel

The Bedouin of St Katherine.

Sunday, 27 July 2014

Hilary Gilbert: One of the oldest monasteries in Christendom is guarded by a tribe of mistreated Arabs: ‘Bedu are barred from the Armed Forces. Education is poor or non-existent: 44 per cent of Bedouin adults have had no education at all, compared with 7 per cent of Egyptians, and professional Bedu are almost unknown. Many lack electricity and accessible water. With healthcare poor, unaffordable or absent, and a heavy-handed security presence, Bedu feel with good reason that their country is failing them.’

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The mosaic of the Transfiguration at St Catherine’s.

Sunday, 27 July 2014

By CYRIL MANGO. THE GREAT APSE mosaic of Christ’s Transfiguration in the Sinai church, today partly hidden from view by the tall sixteenth-century iconostasis, raises a number of questions: Most controversially, what message was it meant to convey? And, when and by whom was it done? In the apse the mosaic illustrates the Transfiguration as […]

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Venice Inside Out.

Saturday, 5 July 2014

here is not a building in Venice, raised prior to the sixteenth century, which has not sustained essential change in one or more of its most important features. By far the greater number present examples of three or four different styles…and, in many instances, the restorations or additions have gradually replaced the entire structure of […]

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Venice and the theatre of memory.

Saturday, 5 July 2014

Hoyt Rogers: ‘Venice teaches us that history is never dead: the humblest portico affords us a proscenium composed of centuries—but not as an album of faded recollections, settled and done. The theatre of memory unveils its meaning only when we behold it as a vital, breathing gospel of the present.’

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City for sale.

Saturday, 5 July 2014

Robin Saikia: ‘Venetians themselves contributed vigorously to the new hell: magnificent palaces and houses were carved up into rentable apartments or cut-price alberghi; restaurants began to serve cheap, anaemic and barely edible versions of local cuisine; the cost of everything from coffee to public transport was set at astronomic levels in the sure knowledge that the dazed visitor was faced with no option but to pay up; commercial premises in Rialto and San Marco were and are progressively sold or rented to the highest bidders, most often the Chinese; the Venice Carnival, in the eighteenth century a spectacular and beautifully-styled piece of civic theatre, has become a sorry example of gimcrack design and disappointing events: a perfect example of a hit-and-run operation designed to remove money from unwary tourists. It comes as no surprise that for over twenty years, in the wake of this vandalism, there has been a deadening sense of paralysis and resignation in the city.’

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A Venetian’s view of Venice.

Saturday, 5 July 2014

Michele Casagrande: ‘Energetically, many want to change things, yet in everyday life the city’s rhythms would seem to be too slow—extremely light-hearted, but fundamentally lazy. The attitude can be expressed through reactions like the following: Living in such a marvelous city, a center of attention for the entire world, why should anyone want to leave? Why should anyone want to move away from a place that can offer very high earnings to people who are basically manual workers, such as gondoliers and taxi drivers?’

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Venezia vista da un veneziano.

Saturday, 5 July 2014

Michele Casagrande: ‘Da veneziano posso facilmente esprimere la prospettiva locale. Da due decadi ormai l’Amministrazione della città ha imposto una nuova varietà di turismo. L’obbiettivo è di massimizzare il numero di turisti, favorendo tutti i servizi che possano produrre un breve passaggio per la città ed un incremento delle entrate per il comune e privati. Il risultato è un’illusoria immagine di Venezia, estremamente superficiale, dove Piazza San Marco non è altro che un bellissimo spazio di fronte a una magnifica chiesa, habitat di simpatici e sporchissimi piccioni. Sfortunatamente per noi, questa piazza è il centro della città in cui viviamo, e l’immane numero di turisti è così fitto da non poter consentire una libera circolazione. Questo intasamento si estende sostanzialmente per tutta la città e talvolta in spazi angusti si rivela ancor più fastidioso, rendendo una semplice camminata uno sgradevole percorso ad ostacoli. Una politica pubblica a favore della quantità piuttosto che la qualità può produrre solamente visitatori che hanno “visto venezia” piuttosto che “vissuto Venezia”.’

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Travel as it was — and as it can be.

Sunday, 23 March 2014

Anthony Howell; ‘By embracing “a resolute digressiveness,” the texts often amount to something we are accustomed to find in French literature, and perhaps in the German of Jean Paul Richter, but less commonly in English – the prose poem. And so the writing, as much as the vista, may at times carry us away, and while some see being carried away as dubious, others embrace it and revel in the liberation…’

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Anthropology, Empire and Modernity.

Tuesday, 30 July 2013

Alan Macfarlane: ‘Very crudely, the Enlightenment signified the shift from a cyclical view of time, to one of progress, of polishing, of growing rationality. An onward and upward movement of history. The great Enlightenment thinkers laid the foundations for all the modern social sciences, so that by the end of the first Enlightenment paradigm, which could be concluded with the publication of Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime in 1856, the basic nature of modernity, as well as the basic outline of the way in which the West would come to dominate the world, had been established.’

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Polis Chrysochous.

Friday, 5 July 2013

Alana Shilling: ‘To be sure, all archaeological sites contain some version of archeology’s own development. In the case of Polis however, this process appears with cinematic magic akin to the kind that can make Technicolor lilacs bud, bloom and wither in milliseconds. Even today, the site retains a certain purity—seek its antiquity as you might, you can find it only in material traces. Were we to rely solely on written sources, the history of Marion and Arsinoe would be consigned to vague references; their very existence would be suspended in the subjunctive.’

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The Invention of the Modern World 17.

Saturday, 1 December 2012

Spring-Summer Serial 2012. Chapter 17: THE ENGLISH PATH By Alan Macfarlane. THERE ARE FOUR possible views about when ‘The Great Divergence’ which led to our modern world began.  One is that it is a very ancient divergence. This would argue that in terms, not of productive output, but of religion, politics, society, ecology, economic organization […]

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The Invention of the Modern World 16.

Thursday, 15 November 2012

Alan Macfarlane: “It was this pugnacious, self-confident, independent character which many thought was the secret of English success in the nineteenth century. Tocqueville wrote ‘seeing the Englishman, certain of the support of his laws, relying on himself and unaware of any obstacle except the limit of his own powers, acting without constraint; seeing him inspired by the sense that he can do anything, look restlessly at what now is, always in search of the best, seeing him like that, I am in no hurry to inquire whether nature has scooped out ports for him, and given him coal and iron. The reason for his commercial prosperity is not there at all: it is in himself.'”

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The Invention of the Modern World 15.

Thursday, 1 November 2012

Alan Macfarlane: The Anglican Church…seems to have operated very much like English law – as a form of oil which lay between the different spheres of English life. It tolerated ambiguities and conflicts and adjudicated between them.

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A quest of the imagination.

Saturday, 20 October 2012

J. B. Bury: When historical methods of aesthetic have been perfected, there may be some chance of sifting out the Greek ideas in comparative purity; and it may be possible for the imagination, in some measure, to grasp the Greek world. The processes of analysis are slow, and our race shall have seen many generations of historians pass, and shall have celebrated many a grammarian’s funeral, before the most skilful navigator can touch the shores of “Hellas” and behold the smoke curl upwards from the hall of Euphrosyne, even then only in the distance.

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The Invention of the Modern World 14.

Monday, 15 October 2012

Alan Macfarlane: America faced the future and not the past. England is a hybrid case. It reverences and tries to preserve the past and is in some way a vast museum. Yet it also systematically and largely successfully forgets the divisions and conflicts, thus allowing a sense of unity, a combining together at the cenotaph, or the King’s College Carols. ‘Let bygones be bygones’ was a favourite phrase of my mother’s parents and many English would agree.

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