Tag: history
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The Tiger’s Eye closes for the last time
The great Australian historian or writer, Inga Clendinnen has died. Image Source: http://www.smh.com.au/national/people/warrior-of-the-mind-20140810-3dha8.html There is a moving obituary by her publisher at Text, Michael Heyward, over at The Australian. There Heyward quotes Clendinnen saying that her turn to writing in response to her life-threatening illness “liberated me from the routines which would have delivered me, unchallenged and […]
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Ivan’s Singer
Image Source: Franz Riss Skomorokh in a village, wikipedia Noone knows for sure how Ivan the Terrible died. The Tsar of all Russia, Grand Prince of Vladimir and Moscow and all the rest, died in 1584, but how we do not really know. The uncertainty, together with the availability of scientific methods, led to the exhumation […]
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The many cradles of civilizations (list)
Civilizations and natures From time to time, I am tempted to be a prophet of a doom, and like Cassandra abandon myself to “the awful pains of prophecy… maddening as they fall” (Agamemnon); but something in my temperament, holds me back to a more tempered and sane view. History is neither progress nor complete decay. […]
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Coming back late from the Hyacinth garden
Image source: Böcklin: In der Gartenlaube, ~1891, By Arnold Böcklin – “Von Anker bis Zünd, Die Kunst im jungen Bundesstaat 1848 – 1900”, Kunsthaus Zürich, 1998, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5543414 Is there a muse more poorly treated in modern culture than Clio? We forget. We lose the art of telling the stories of history in all […]
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Quotes to write by 1.
From Niccolo Machiavelli’s letter to the magnificent Lorenzo de Medici in presenting his The Prince: Nor I hope will it be considered presumptuous for a man of low and humble status to dare discuss and lay down the law about how princes should rule; because, just as men who are sketching the landscape put themselves […]
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Madness & History
I am reading Andrew Scull’s Madness in Civilization: a cultural history of insanity from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine (Thames & Hudson, 2015). The title is a wink to the English translation of Foucault’s Folie et Déraison, that is Madness & Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. […]
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A song of sorries
The Parliament of Victoria recently voted an apology for laws that criminalised homosexuality. It followed a more substantive act – at least on paper – that had expunged (word rarely used and now given new life for this purpose), that expunged the criminal records of people convicted under these laws. This act, however, was not […]
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Time may change me but I can’t change time
Roger Scruton writes, in How to be a Conservative: Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold fast to those things, in order to pass them on to our children […]
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Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers
If I were to teach a course on the history of Australians in the global nineteenth century, I would begin with a reading of this most remarkable book, perhaps turning attention to Inga Clendinnen’s close reading of the episode of the Spearing of the Governor (Arthur Phillip) in a misunderstood stumbling dance of strangers divided […]
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The enigmas of Ivan the Terrible
Ivan the Terrible tests the limits of historical understanding. All that we know of him we only seem to know of him. All the stories we tell of him we can narrate only with difficulty separate from legend. His experience of the world, to the extent that we can reach that interpretation beneath other interpretations, […]
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Inspirations from Roberto Calasso
I aspire to write history not like a dry professor, but more like the shimmering mysteries of the past evoked by writers like W.G. Sebald or the sometimes ponderous but often astonishing Roberto Calasso. “There is no essential reason for history to be distinguished from literature,” he writes in the most enigmatic of histories of […]
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Third Rome
First there was the Latin empire, polyglot and legal, centred on Rome. Then there was the Eastern Empire, religious and magnificent, radiating out, then sucking itself back in when defending itself against Goths, Slavs, Persians and Arabs, in the seeming impregnable perfection of Constantinople. Then at last there was the third Rome – Holy Mother […]
The Burning Archive 