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Index: History & Travel

All wrapped in white linen, as cold as the clay.

Thursday, 10 March 2011

Jesse Mullins: The American frontier forged American character. It might not be going too far to say that the appearance of the cowboy in the late 1800s marked the culmination of the protracted process that yielded the quintessentially American character.

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· Abdul Karim, serving at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

Sunday, 27 February 2011

A new archive of letters, pictures and Abdul Karim’s “lost diary”, held secretly by his family for more than a century, sheds new light on their relationship

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Experts stare at the floor and try to make sense of it all.

Sunday, 20 February 2011

We simply don’t know whether it was part of a residence or an official building, and we can’t even say whether the owner or owners were Jewish, Christian, or pagan. The date is not secure either, although the excavator proposes about AD 300…

Also filed in Art & Architecture, Chronicle & Notices, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)

Germany’s Orientalism express and the dream of global jihad.

Friday, 18 February 2011

The Berlin-to-Baghdad railway: Who can speak with confidence of Max von Oppenheim, the godfather of German “Orientalism” and a sponsor of holy war?

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Rio 1: Só Danço Samba.

Friday, 18 February 2011

Anthony Howell: The body moves forward and back more in gafieira; the weight changes are exaggerated, and the partner sways with you, and I have to get the ‘step-replace step, step-replace step’ going, understanding that there is a this-side-then-that-side symmetry to the dance that again is different to the tango.

Also filed in Dance & Performance, Principal Articles | Tagged | Comments (0)

December paragraphs from Rio.

Sunday, 26 December 2010

Anthony Howell: Brazil is committed to cleaning up the favelas before they host the World Cup, so the tourists sit on the beach, sipping green coconut juice and getting swept up by the waves, in a town where certain pockets are more or less war zones.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Dance & Performance | | Comments (0)

Inventing Asia, with Conrad, Greene, and a tourists’ Bible.

Monday, 29 November 2010

Kate Hoyland: ‘My points of reference for writing about Asia in The Icarus Diaries – a fictionalised Asia, so doubly suspect – were Conrad – the old colonialist – and Greene, the “objective” journalist who travelled to war zones for kicks.’

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Three encounters near Kerala. December 2006.

Sunday, 12 September 2010

Martin Sorrell: Notes from Kerala.

Also filed in Poetry & Fiction | Tagged | Comments (0)

Fragment: Concepts of Time and the World We Live In.

Sunday, 4 April 2010

Alan Macfarlane, on arranging books: If we are to understand these changing paradigms in the past, and the way they swing in the present, we should note that they seem to shadow political relations and the rate of economic progress. The general rule appears to be that in periods of rapid economic and technological growth, especially when this is linked to political dominance and expansion by a certain civilization, confidence rises and optimistic, ‘progressive’ and teleological theories dominate.

Also filed in Anthropology and Sociology, Books & Publishing, Politics & Culture, Principal Articles | Tagged | Comments (1)
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