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Index: History & Travel

• Moses Montefiore calls on the Successor of the Prophet of the Lord of the Universe.

Saturday, 13 August 2011

His visitor was Sir Moses Montefiore, a hugely rich financier who had come from London representing the British government, the mightiest power on earth, but also on behalf of a people then far from mighty in temporal terms, though much older than the Ottomans, England or Islam.

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• The Berlin-Vichy parentage of the European Union and its troublesome coin.

Saturday, 23 July 2011

The new order was European. With French and German bankers, industrialists, and other businessmen meeting regularly, the idea of a United States of Europe was making its way, along with visions of a single customs zone and a single European currency. The European Union, its attendant bureaucracy, even the euro, all appear to stem from the Berlin-Vichy collaboration.

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· Otto von Habsburg: The grand old order knocks on heaven’s door.

Saturday, 16 July 2011

In the cool, dry air of a Vienna crypt, Austria will today agree an uneasy truce with the late Otto von Habsburg, the man who would be kaiser.

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• After the Bastille: ‘Vendée, du génocide au mémoricide’.

Thursday, 14 July 2011

While many of our countrymen are celebrating July 14 and observing the traditional celebrations of the French Revolution, this is a book that should cause renewed controversy, 25 years after the publication of A French Genocide: The Vendee (by the same author).

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• In Syria: ‘The Protocols’ are somewhere in Rifaat Eid’s drawers.

Thursday, 14 July 2011

‘Have you read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?’ he asked me. ‘It’s very good, I’ll find you a copy.’ He started to rummage around in his drawers, muttering something about how, a century ago, it had had the foresight to predict war in underground tunnels.

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· The last place to look for reason is in an Egyptian revolution.

Friday, 3 June 2011

Magada wants to unburden herself, release the anguish inside. But it must be to someone who can help her son. She sits silently, the weight of her loss left unspoken bearing down upon her as much as the pressure of the sun’s heat sears her neck draining her of energy and hope.

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· Those were the days, when prostitutes dreamed of the presidency and preachers pushed abortions.

Monday, 30 May 2011

Victoria Woodhull was quite a gal. Having once been an actress and prostitute in Gold Rush San Francisco, she moved on to New York and was ‘reborn’, becoming the first female broker on Wall Street, then founding her very own newspaper to promote her political dream – which was to stand for the presidency in 1872, fighting under the banner of suffrage, free love and equal rights for all.

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· The earthquake in Japan: it’s only been a month?

Sunday, 10 April 2011

IT’S SHOCKING TO ADMIT that the Japanese earthquake is just a day shy of being month-old news. It’s also hard to admit that, as in every Man v. Nature narrative, the moral of the story is completely absent. All we have are aftershocks. By SUSANNA JONES [New Statesman] – It will take generations for the […]

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Rio 3: Capoeira, the duel-dance, with dreadlocks and agogô.

Saturday, 9 April 2011

Anthony Howell: Capoeira is a duelling dance; the contestants weaving into mutual scissors, circling each other in apparent friendliness and then ducking into attack.

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· Stopping by Fred Nietzsche’s house.

Friday, 8 April 2011

The time he spent there appears to have been peaceful, even if, according to a Nietzsche Haus curator, children would fill his umbrella with stones so that they’d fall on his head when he opened it.

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· ‘Victorian sex’: Not your great-great-grandfather’s oxymoron.

Thursday, 24 March 2011

All the protagonists are male, with the women reduced to mere quickly potted biographies. The book leaves the “new eroticism” as a masculine invention. It’s one tryst after another, one flagellation after the next.

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· The life of a poet: Madras, 1931.

Sunday, 20 March 2011

So unlike John Morley or W. E. Henley, I thought, and so unobtrusive. I had seen ‘Triveni’ but today I was meeting its Editor, and it seemed a moment on which somebody’s destiny depended.

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· In Rathcoole, a fear of the Taigs in the dark.

Thursday, 17 March 2011

The “Taigs” were Catholics. Though Mitchell didn’t know any, and his parents held no bias, the Taigs became the bogeymen of his boyhood. And, gradually, “the fear of the bogeyman turned to hatred”.

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· Rio 2: Grumpus at Carnival.

Friday, 11 March 2011

Anthony Howell: As with any popular mass rally there’s an infectious excitement, and a sheer childish delight in the chiaroscuro of dark and light moods and bright or sombre costume. One school merges into another in the mind. Neptunes abound. Faces fall off and disappear into stomachs and then reappear.

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· Violence in the Old West? Only when the government marched in.

Thursday, 10 March 2011

The civil society of the American West in the nineteenth century was much more peaceful than American cities are today, and the evidence suggests that in fact the Old West was not a very violent place at all. History also reveals that the expanded presence of the U.S. government was the real cause of a culture of violence in the American West.

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