MetaFilter posts by verstegan.
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Top pop from seventeenth-century England. Broadside ballads were single-sheet songs that sold for a penny a piece. This website presents lyrics and recordings of over 100 of the most successful, from The Judgement of God shewed upon one John Faustus, Doctor in Divinity to A True Relation of the Life and Death of Sir Andrew Barton, a Pyrate and Rover on the Seas. Come and sing along with the chart toppers of the seventeenth century.
posted on Jan-28-24 at 4:25 PM
Back in June, the historian Jenny Bulstrode published a paper, Black Metallurgists and the Making of the Industrial Revolution, in which she argued that one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution had been pioneered by (and stolen from) enslaved ironworkers in Jamaica. Now another historian, Oliver Jelf, has published a reply, which, to put it mildly, casts considerable doubt on Bulstrode's claims (it's been described as a 'ruthless demolition job which makes for a gruesomely compelling read'). Anton Howes asks: does history have a replication crisis?
posted on Sep-13-23 at 3:26 PM
Isabella Rosner: I've come across A LOT of good 17th- and 18th-century Quaker names over the past 3.5 years, as I've worked on my thesis. Now that my thesis is done and submission is near, it's time to share the more than 90 wildest early Quaker names I've found. (SLTwitter)
posted on May-17-23 at 5:57 AM
Back in 2004, plans were announced for a sumptuous new edition of John Crowley's beloved fantasy novel Little, Big, to be published in 2006 to mark the book's 25th anniversary. Years passed, the project stalled, irate subscribers started demanding their money back. Then in 2021 Neil Gaiman stepped in to rescue the project, and this week it was announced that the first copies have shipped. Gaiman has posted a video of himself unboxing his copy.
posted on Jan-24-23 at 8:27 AM
If you've been to Nashville, chances are you've eaten at Arnold's Country Kitchen. The iconic restaurant (winner of a James Beard Foundation America's Classics Award) closed today after a 40-year run. Owners Rose and Kahlil Arnold explain why they chose to step away, Mike Wolf explains why Arnold's was Nashville's best restaurant, and other locals explain why it's hard to imagine Nashville without it.
posted on Jan-7-23 at 6:35 PM
Every year, thousands of bicycles are tossed into rivers, ponds, lakes and canals. Jody Rosen, author of Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle, ponders the question: why do so many bikes end up underwater?
posted on Jul-28-22 at 12:25 AM
In November 2020, Cambridge University Library announced that two of Charles Darwin's notebooks, including his famous 'Tree of Life' sketch, were missing, believed stolen. (Previously on MetaFilter.) Now there's an update, and it's good news: the notebooks have returned, in a bright pink gift bag left outside the librarian's office with the printed message: Librarian / Happy Easter / X.
posted on Apr-5-22 at 2:41 PM
A treasure trove of women's intellectual history has been discovered in a Cambridge college library after being forgotten for nearly 300 years. The astonishing collection comprises 47 books and pamphlets owned and annotated by the philosopher Mary Astell (1666–1731), viewed by many as “the first English feminist”.
posted on Mar-9-21 at 1:43 AM
The Four Black Deaths , by Monica H. Green, a historian of medicine and global health, proposes a new interpretation of the Black Death based on DNA evidence. "Together, the documentary and genetic records support the idea that there were four Black Deaths: four explosive proliferations of Yersinia pestis into new environments." The article is available on open access until 31 December, and has already been stirring up some excitement on Medieval Twitter.
posted on Dec-28-20 at 10:20 AM
Earlier this week a Cambridge University scholar announced an astonishing literary discovery: John Milton's annotated copy of Shakespeare's First Folio, hiding in plain sight in the Free Library of Philadelphia. If the identification is confirmed (and the scholarly reaction on Twitter, initially cautious, is now becoming increasingly positive), it will be only the tenth book (or eleventh, if you count his family Bible) known to survive from Milton's personal library.
posted on Sep-13-19 at 2:50 PM
"Any system of control must make some small place for the dynamic, the unexpected, the downright quirky. I therefore recommend that the Headington shark be allowed to remain." RIP Bill Heine, broadcaster, journalist, and the man behind one of Britain's best-loved pieces of public art.
posted on Apr-8-19 at 4:48 AM
News from Norfolk , 'the occasional diary of someone who lives in an old house in East Anglia', has three tales for Halloween: all set in Norfolk, and all in the classic tradition of the English ghost story. The Old Road. Incomers. Old Tom.
posted on Oct-28-18 at 2:37 AM
It had been hiding in plain sight. The original letter — long thought lost — in which Galileo Galilei first set down his arguments against the church’s doctrine that the Sun orbits the Earth has been discovered in a misdated library catalogue in London. Its unearthing and analysis expose critical new details about the saga that led to the astronomer’s condemnation for heresy in 1633.
posted on Sep-21-18 at 12:29 PM
On 20 April 1968, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered one of the most divisive speeches ever made by a British politician, in which he argued that by permitting mass immigration, the country was "heaping up its own funeral pyre". The speech caused an outcry, but 'Enoch was right' has been a racist dog-whistle for far-right politicians ever since. Fifty years on, the BBC explores the legacy of the speech for the immigrant communities in Wolverhampton, Powell's old constituency: Living in Enoch's Shadow. (Warning: offensive language)
posted on Apr-20-18 at 4:55 AM
Princeton University, founded as the College of New Jersey in 1746, exemplifies the central paradox of American history. From the start, liberty and slavery were intertwined. The Princeton and Slavery Project investigates the University’s involvement with the institution of slavery, through a range of primary sources and stories exploring its slaveholding presidents and professors, its African American communities on campus and in town, its first African American students, and the legacy of slavery in its archives and public memorials.
posted on Nov-7-17 at 6:14 AM
"If you raised the pig a smidge to adjust her relationship to the house, that threw off the balance of the frog to the pitchfork." Michael K. Frith, former Creative Director for Jim Henson Productions, on the making of Miss Piggy's American Gothique.
posted on Mar-7-17 at 3:34 PM
We invite you to listen in on a musical gathering that took place in Jamaica in 1688. These three songs, 'Angola', 'Papa' and 'Koromanti', performed at a festival by enslaved African musicians and copied in musical notation by a Mr Baptiste, are the first transcription of African music in the Caribbean, and, indeed, probably in the Americas. Thanks to this remarkable artifact, we can listen to traces of music performed long ago and begin to imagine what it meant for the people who created it.
posted on Sep-19-16 at 12:22 PM
Marie Duval was one of the most unusual, pioneering and boisterous cartoonists of the nineteenth century. As a groundbreaking female cartoonist depicting a long-overlooked urban, often working-class milieu, the wide range and quantity of her work has been forgotten. A new website showcases her work for the comic magazine Judy, including her most famous creation, the working-class anti-hero Ally Sloper, 'the first comics superstar'.
posted on Apr-9-16 at 6:16 AM
One of the great things about medieval art and architecture is that people just went in and did things. They didn’t build models and scale them up. Building great cathedrals and abbeys was a learning process as much as anything else. This means many of these apparently perfect aspirations to the Heavenly Jerusalem have some often quite comical mistakes, corrections and bodge-jobs that once you see, you can’t unnotice. Great Mistakes in English Medieval Architecture.
posted on Aug-17-14 at 3:59 AM
On 24 June 1914, a young man caught the 10.20 train from London to Malvern. At around 12.45 the train stopped at a small country station in Gloucestershire. And what happened then? Well .. nothing much. The station closed in 1966, but this afternoon a special train will be stopping there, unwontedly, to mark the centenary of one of the best-loved poems in the English language.
posted on Jun-24-14 at 1:16 AM
The poet Rosemary Tonks turned her back on the literary world in the mid-1970s, leaving behind her a handful of strange and brilliant poems and a small band of devoted admirers who longed to know what had happened to her. For forty years she disappeared completely, 'evaporated into air like the Cheshire Cat', as Brian Patten remarked in a 2009 BBC documentary, The Poet Who Vanished. Now, with news of her death at the age of 85, the story of her life is starting to emerge.
posted on May-3-14 at 2:39 PM
The only known recording of the Cambridge spy Guy Burgess , made just before he defected to Russia in 1951, has been recovered from FBI files by researchers at City University London. Speaking late at night, and clearly the worse for drink, Burgess describes his meeting with Winston Churchill in September 1938, shortly after the Munich Agreement, and recreates Churchill's side of the story with a number of amusing impressions.
posted on Jan-24-14 at 12:53 PM
Bess of Hardwick's Letters brings together the correspondence of one of the most powerful women of the Elizabethan era, the builder of one of England's greatest houses and the founder of one of its greatest political dynasties. As well as telling the story of Bess's life, it offers an introduction to early modern letters and a guide to reading early modern handwriting.
posted on May-13-13 at 10:59 AM
The BBC documentary The Fishing Party captures the mood of the Thatcher era with devastating accuracy. First broadcast in 1986, it follows a group of four City businessmen on a fishing trip to Scotland as they air their opinions on politics, money, education, discipline, women and dogs. Hilarious and appalling by turns, the whole documentary can now be viewed on YouTube: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. (Bonus link: the director Paul Watson describes the making of 'Mrs Thatcher's least favourite film ever'.)
posted on Apr-9-13 at 3:27 PM
When it first surfaced in 2005, it was hailed as 'the most important Galileo find in more than a century'. Then, in June 2012, news broke on the Ex Libris mailing list that the unique 'proof copy' of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius containing his original drawings of the Moon was in fact a highly sophisticated forgery. The full story is still unclear, but the finger of suspicion points at Marino Massimo de Caro, who in his brief reign as director of the Girolamini Library in Naples removed thousands of rare books in what has been described as a 'premeditated, organised and brutal' sacking of the library. Meanwhile, experts are still marvelling at the quality of the forgery: "We’ve seen missing pages replaced in facsimile, but no one dreamed that an entire book could be forged, something that is now more easily possible because of modern technology."
posted on Apr-4-13 at 3:33 PM
The Rev John Graham (better known as Araucaria) is the most loved, feared and respected of British crossword compilers. Aged 91, and still at the top of his game, his achievements include the 26-letter anagram that some fans have described as 'the best crossword clue ever'. So it was only natural that he should use a set of cryptic clues in one of his own puzzles to break the news that he is dying of cancer.
posted on Jan-12-13 at 1:53 AM
The Geese Book is a lavishly illustrated manuscript of choral music, written for the church of St Lorenz, Nuremberg, between 1504 and 1510. It takes its name from a whimsical illustration showing a choir of geese with a wolf as their choirmaster. The manuscript has now been digitized, and many of the chants recorded, so that you can listen to the music (or even sing along) while following the text. Highlights include Christmas, with a fox and rooster, Ascension Day, with the famous choir of geese, All Saints' Day, with a dragon eating a baby, and the Mass for St Lawrence, with a musical bear.
posted on Nov-29-12 at 3:52 AM
'The life of the city is infinite and unknowable; all we can do is look and report on what we find.' The London Column presents images of the city over the last sixty years, from the Festival of Britain to the present, a highly eclectic mix but with an emphasis on the everyday, the down-at-heel, the neglected and the unexpected. The compiler, David Secombe (formerly of Esoteric London), admits to 'a certain creeping cynicism towards the looming Olympic bunfight'. Like London itself, the site isn't easy to navigate, but the best way to browse is to go to the gallery page and follow the images that take your fancy.
posted on Jul-27-12 at 4:17 AM
"I still buy books faster than I can read them. But this feels completely normal. How weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life." Julian Barnes reflects on his life as a bibliophile, the disappearance of secondhand bookshops and the precarious survival of the physical book.
posted on Jun-30-12 at 1:25 AM
Some of his photographs are odd. Others are just creepy. But thanks to his hobby of photographing young women with a hidden camera, Edward Linley Sambourne (1844-1910) has left us a fascinating series of images of street fashion in Edwardian London. [some photos NSFW]
posted on Apr-10-12 at 1:20 AM
"He is the kind of boy who is bound to be rather a problem in any school or community, being in some respects definitely anti-social." Alan Turing's school reports.
posted on Mar-22-12 at 3:23 AM
The Hatchet Job of the Year Award, sponsored by The Omnivore, is looking for 'the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the last twelve months'. The shortlist includes Geoff Dyer on Julian Barnes ('excellent in its averageness'), Lachlan Mackinnon on Geoffrey Hill ('he is wasting his time and trying to waste ours') and Jenni Russell on Catherine Hakim ('if you should pass it in a bookshop, pick up a copy and drop it somewhere where nobody's likely to take an interest in it'). Mary Beard, another of the shortlisted candidates, insists that 'it's not actually a prize for skewering .. it's for honest as well as entertaining book reviewing, that isn't afraid to go beyond deference, to call a spade a spade'.
posted on Jan-17-12 at 4:22 PM
X-ray technology developed for airport security and bomb disposal is now being used to see beneath the surface of eighteenth-century furniture. The resulting images are unexpectedly clear and often beautiful in themselves, revealing not just nails and screws but also layers of upholstery and even woodworm tunnels. (Via Treasure Hunt, Emile de Bruijn's blog featuring works of art in the National Trust's historic houses.)
posted on Jun-25-11 at 3:37 PM
'The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish.' Daniel Mendelsohn dislikes Mad Men.
posted on Feb-4-11 at 6:03 AM
"Among medieval artistic media it was the microchip": the historian Alexander Murray on ivory carving. The Gothic Ivories Project, a new website launched this week by the Courtauld Institute in London, aims to build a database of every surviving ivory sculpture made in Europe between 1200 and 1530. The 400 objects currently on the site, ranging from combs to chesspieces, include some images of astonishing beauty and intricacy.
posted on Dec-17-10 at 3:09 AM
In December 2008 the journalist Victoria Coren revealed the existence of a bizarre crew of professional gatecrashers, led by ex-magistrate Terence Jolley, who liked to show up at the funerals of people they'd never met, apparently in the hope of cadging some free food and drink. Their activities were exposed after Coren advertised a (fictitious) memorial service for the (imaginary) Sir William Ormerod and waited for the Jolley Gang to fall into the trap (previously on MetaFilter). Now the Jolley Gang are back in the news after one of their number, 'retired banker' Alan MacDonald, gatecrashed a party at the Dorchester Hotel and choked to death on a canapé.
posted on Mar-21-10 at 8:15 AM
'A site dedicated to songs about London. The only rules are that the songs must be brilliant and that the blindingly obvious numbers are excluded.' The London Nobody Sings takes you on a musical tour of the capital, by bus, train and tube, via Camden Town, Parliament Hill, Portobello Road, Shepherd's Bush, Southall, Tottenham and Tooting Broadway. And if it's too late to take the Underground? Don't worry, the trams may have gone, but you can always catch the Nightbus home.
posted on Feb-14-10 at 3:37 AM
Today is the centenary of the Dreadnought Hoax, when a group of pranksters paid a ceremonial visit to the Royal Navy's flagship, HMS Dreadnought, pretending to be the Emperor of Abyssinia and his retinue. The organiser of the hoax was Horace de Vere Cole, an inveterate practical joker whose favourite trick was to 'walk with a cow's udder protruding from his flies and then cut it off with scissors before aghast bystanders'. But one of the other hoaxers went on to become famous for other reasons. Her name? Virginia Woolf.
posted on Feb-7-10 at 12:07 AM
The papers of Edward Alleyn, the Elizabethan actor-manager, are now available online in a digital edition. Most of what we know about the London theatre in the age of Shakespeare comes from this archive; highlights include the only surviving example of a 'part' or script written out for an actor in an Elizabethan play (image) and the contract for building the Fortune playhouse in 1600, just a year after the building of the Globe. Sadly, the archive doesn't include any manuscripts relating to Shakespeare, because Alleyn worked for the Admiral's Men, one of the two main theatre companies in London, whereas Shakespeare worked for the competition (the Lord Chamberlain's Men), though that didn't stop the nineteenth-century forger John Payne Collier from faking a few documents of his own to fill the gap.
posted on Dec-11-09 at 10:32 AM
On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, Lieutenant John Purvis risked court-martial by taking some snapshots of the battlefield. Now his photograph album has been put online. It gives an extraordinary insight into what it was like to be an ordinary soldier in the middle of the battle, marching up to the front, resting in the forward lines, taking cover as a bomb explodes, advancing into battle, watching a shell burst, digging into freshly made trenches, or moving forward over captured ground.
posted on Nov-11-09 at 3:00 AM
London Sound Survey collects the everyday sounds of the capital, including the bells of St Clement's, the call to prayer at the Whitechapel mosque, football fans outside Millwall stadium, a demo in Piccadilly, dubstep at the Notting Hill Carnival and a street preacher at Speaker's Corner.. not forgetting, of course, those ubiquitous sounds of London life, 'Big Issue! Big Issue!' and announcements of planned engineering works on the Tube. (Via.)
posted on Jun-25-09 at 12:23 AM
In 1839, soon after Queen Victoria's accession, the Earl of Eglinton staged a re-enactment of a medieval tournament to mark the beginning of what he hoped would be a new age of chivalry. Despite torrential rain, the Eglinton Tournament was attended by 100,000 people and sparked off a popular craze for all things medieval. A new website tells the story of the tournament and reproduces, for the first time, twenty original watercolours recording the event in all its romantic splendour and absurdity.
posted on Jun-4-09 at 7:06 AM
"Do you love me? Will you answer this all absorbing question the next time we meet? Will you utter that winsome "Yes" fraught with all the golden dreams of heavenly realms, or will you pronounce the dread "No" and consign my soul to darkness and despair?" Advertising for Love, a collection of funny, strange, poignant and bizarre personal ads from nineteenth-century American newspapers.
posted on May-29-09 at 9:03 AM
In 1857, hundreds of strange objects suddenly started appearing in London antique shops: coins and medals, vases and statues, all made out of soft metal with weird designs and cryptic lettering. They were the work of two illiterate London mudlarks, William Smith and Charles Eaton, who managed to fool some of the leading archaeologists of the day into accepting their forgeries as genuine medieval antiquities.
posted on Aug-30-08 at 10:03 AM
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey has been posted (and double-posted) here before, but it's just been given a major upgrade that effectively turns it into a new site, with the addition of 100,000 new trial reports covering the period 1834 to 1913, and the full text of the Newgate Ordinary's Accounts reporting the confessions and last dying speeches of criminals sentenced to death. The thousands of human tragedies recorded in the trial reports (some famous, others forgotten) are fascinating and often deeply moving.
posted on Apr-27-08 at 6:06 AM
Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities features strange and surprising things from the rare book and manuscript collections of the Beinecke Library in Yale, including death masks, the philosophy of origami, the real adventures of Tintin, famous people and their pets, and American transvestite magazines from the 1960s.
posted on Apr-11-08 at 10:40 AM
John Milton was born 400 years ago this year, and several excellent websites have been created to mark the anniversary. Two online exhibitions, Citizen Milton and Living At This Hour, celebrate Milton's achievement with a display of early editions and later artistic interpretations, while Darkness Visible offers an accessible introduction to Paradise Lost for readers encountering the poem for the first time, including an interesting discussion of Milton's influence on Philip Pullman (who responds here with his own tribute to Paradise Lost, 'the greatest poem by England's greatest public poet').
posted on Feb-1-08 at 3:34 AM
The Reading Experience Database is collecting information about 'what British people read, where and when they read it, and what they thought of it' between 1450 and 1945. You can sample the database by searching for reader responses to (e.g.) Shakespeare or Dickens or Karl Marx, or to newspapers in general. It's a collaborative project, open to everyone, so why not contribute?
posted on Jul-26-07 at 6:24 AM
Leonardo comes to life. A stunning collection of short animations based on Leonardo da Vinci's sketchbooks. Watch a man running, a human heart beating, a tank moving, a bird flying, or a geometrical model rotating. Then visit the Universal Leonardo website to find out more about the man himself.
posted on Oct-12-06 at 12:19 PM
The Poetry Archive claims to be "the world's premier online collection of recordings of poets reading their work". The main page will open a RealAudio file whether you want it to or not, so you may prefer to explore the site from one of the inside pages, like the Historic Recordings page, where you can listen to Robert Browning (reciting "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" and forgetting the words halfway through), Alfred Tennyson ("The Charge of the Light Brigade") or W.B. Yeats (sonorously declaiming "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"). Or if you want something more modern, there's Ashbery, Heaney, Logue, Pinter .. (Warning: all links to individual poets have embedded RealAudio files.)
posted on Dec-9-05 at 2:18 AM
posted on Jan-28-24 at 4:25 PM
Back in June, the historian Jenny Bulstrode published a paper, Black Metallurgists and the Making of the Industrial Revolution, in which she argued that one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution had been pioneered by (and stolen from) enslaved ironworkers in Jamaica. Now another historian, Oliver Jelf, has published a reply, which, to put it mildly, casts considerable doubt on Bulstrode's claims (it's been described as a 'ruthless demolition job which makes for a gruesomely compelling read'). Anton Howes asks: does history have a replication crisis?
posted on Sep-13-23 at 3:26 PM
Isabella Rosner: I've come across A LOT of good 17th- and 18th-century Quaker names over the past 3.5 years, as I've worked on my thesis. Now that my thesis is done and submission is near, it's time to share the more than 90 wildest early Quaker names I've found. (SLTwitter)
posted on May-17-23 at 5:57 AM
Back in 2004, plans were announced for a sumptuous new edition of John Crowley's beloved fantasy novel Little, Big, to be published in 2006 to mark the book's 25th anniversary. Years passed, the project stalled, irate subscribers started demanding their money back. Then in 2021 Neil Gaiman stepped in to rescue the project, and this week it was announced that the first copies have shipped. Gaiman has posted a video of himself unboxing his copy.
posted on Jan-24-23 at 8:27 AM
If you've been to Nashville, chances are you've eaten at Arnold's Country Kitchen. The iconic restaurant (winner of a James Beard Foundation America's Classics Award) closed today after a 40-year run. Owners Rose and Kahlil Arnold explain why they chose to step away, Mike Wolf explains why Arnold's was Nashville's best restaurant, and other locals explain why it's hard to imagine Nashville without it.
posted on Jan-7-23 at 6:35 PM
Every year, thousands of bicycles are tossed into rivers, ponds, lakes and canals. Jody Rosen, author of Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle, ponders the question: why do so many bikes end up underwater?
posted on Jul-28-22 at 12:25 AM
In November 2020, Cambridge University Library announced that two of Charles Darwin's notebooks, including his famous 'Tree of Life' sketch, were missing, believed stolen. (Previously on MetaFilter.) Now there's an update, and it's good news: the notebooks have returned, in a bright pink gift bag left outside the librarian's office with the printed message: Librarian / Happy Easter / X.
posted on Apr-5-22 at 2:41 PM
A treasure trove of women's intellectual history has been discovered in a Cambridge college library after being forgotten for nearly 300 years. The astonishing collection comprises 47 books and pamphlets owned and annotated by the philosopher Mary Astell (1666–1731), viewed by many as “the first English feminist”.
posted on Mar-9-21 at 1:43 AM
The Four Black Deaths , by Monica H. Green, a historian of medicine and global health, proposes a new interpretation of the Black Death based on DNA evidence. "Together, the documentary and genetic records support the idea that there were four Black Deaths: four explosive proliferations of Yersinia pestis into new environments." The article is available on open access until 31 December, and has already been stirring up some excitement on Medieval Twitter.
posted on Dec-28-20 at 10:20 AM
Earlier this week a Cambridge University scholar announced an astonishing literary discovery: John Milton's annotated copy of Shakespeare's First Folio, hiding in plain sight in the Free Library of Philadelphia. If the identification is confirmed (and the scholarly reaction on Twitter, initially cautious, is now becoming increasingly positive), it will be only the tenth book (or eleventh, if you count his family Bible) known to survive from Milton's personal library.
posted on Sep-13-19 at 2:50 PM
"Any system of control must make some small place for the dynamic, the unexpected, the downright quirky. I therefore recommend that the Headington shark be allowed to remain." RIP Bill Heine, broadcaster, journalist, and the man behind one of Britain's best-loved pieces of public art.
posted on Apr-8-19 at 4:48 AM
News from Norfolk , 'the occasional diary of someone who lives in an old house in East Anglia', has three tales for Halloween: all set in Norfolk, and all in the classic tradition of the English ghost story. The Old Road. Incomers. Old Tom.
posted on Oct-28-18 at 2:37 AM
It had been hiding in plain sight. The original letter — long thought lost — in which Galileo Galilei first set down his arguments against the church’s doctrine that the Sun orbits the Earth has been discovered in a misdated library catalogue in London. Its unearthing and analysis expose critical new details about the saga that led to the astronomer’s condemnation for heresy in 1633.
posted on Sep-21-18 at 12:29 PM
On 20 April 1968, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered one of the most divisive speeches ever made by a British politician, in which he argued that by permitting mass immigration, the country was "heaping up its own funeral pyre". The speech caused an outcry, but 'Enoch was right' has been a racist dog-whistle for far-right politicians ever since. Fifty years on, the BBC explores the legacy of the speech for the immigrant communities in Wolverhampton, Powell's old constituency: Living in Enoch's Shadow. (Warning: offensive language)
posted on Apr-20-18 at 4:55 AM
Princeton University, founded as the College of New Jersey in 1746, exemplifies the central paradox of American history. From the start, liberty and slavery were intertwined. The Princeton and Slavery Project investigates the University’s involvement with the institution of slavery, through a range of primary sources and stories exploring its slaveholding presidents and professors, its African American communities on campus and in town, its first African American students, and the legacy of slavery in its archives and public memorials.
posted on Nov-7-17 at 6:14 AM
"If you raised the pig a smidge to adjust her relationship to the house, that threw off the balance of the frog to the pitchfork." Michael K. Frith, former Creative Director for Jim Henson Productions, on the making of Miss Piggy's American Gothique.
posted on Mar-7-17 at 3:34 PM
We invite you to listen in on a musical gathering that took place in Jamaica in 1688. These three songs, 'Angola', 'Papa' and 'Koromanti', performed at a festival by enslaved African musicians and copied in musical notation by a Mr Baptiste, are the first transcription of African music in the Caribbean, and, indeed, probably in the Americas. Thanks to this remarkable artifact, we can listen to traces of music performed long ago and begin to imagine what it meant for the people who created it.
posted on Sep-19-16 at 12:22 PM
Marie Duval was one of the most unusual, pioneering and boisterous cartoonists of the nineteenth century. As a groundbreaking female cartoonist depicting a long-overlooked urban, often working-class milieu, the wide range and quantity of her work has been forgotten. A new website showcases her work for the comic magazine Judy, including her most famous creation, the working-class anti-hero Ally Sloper, 'the first comics superstar'.
posted on Apr-9-16 at 6:16 AM
One of the great things about medieval art and architecture is that people just went in and did things. They didn’t build models and scale them up. Building great cathedrals and abbeys was a learning process as much as anything else. This means many of these apparently perfect aspirations to the Heavenly Jerusalem have some often quite comical mistakes, corrections and bodge-jobs that once you see, you can’t unnotice. Great Mistakes in English Medieval Architecture.
posted on Aug-17-14 at 3:59 AM
On 24 June 1914, a young man caught the 10.20 train from London to Malvern. At around 12.45 the train stopped at a small country station in Gloucestershire. And what happened then? Well .. nothing much. The station closed in 1966, but this afternoon a special train will be stopping there, unwontedly, to mark the centenary of one of the best-loved poems in the English language.
posted on Jun-24-14 at 1:16 AM
The poet Rosemary Tonks turned her back on the literary world in the mid-1970s, leaving behind her a handful of strange and brilliant poems and a small band of devoted admirers who longed to know what had happened to her. For forty years she disappeared completely, 'evaporated into air like the Cheshire Cat', as Brian Patten remarked in a 2009 BBC documentary, The Poet Who Vanished. Now, with news of her death at the age of 85, the story of her life is starting to emerge.
posted on May-3-14 at 2:39 PM
The only known recording of the Cambridge spy Guy Burgess , made just before he defected to Russia in 1951, has been recovered from FBI files by researchers at City University London. Speaking late at night, and clearly the worse for drink, Burgess describes his meeting with Winston Churchill in September 1938, shortly after the Munich Agreement, and recreates Churchill's side of the story with a number of amusing impressions.
posted on Jan-24-14 at 12:53 PM
Bess of Hardwick's Letters brings together the correspondence of one of the most powerful women of the Elizabethan era, the builder of one of England's greatest houses and the founder of one of its greatest political dynasties. As well as telling the story of Bess's life, it offers an introduction to early modern letters and a guide to reading early modern handwriting.
posted on May-13-13 at 10:59 AM
The BBC documentary The Fishing Party captures the mood of the Thatcher era with devastating accuracy. First broadcast in 1986, it follows a group of four City businessmen on a fishing trip to Scotland as they air their opinions on politics, money, education, discipline, women and dogs. Hilarious and appalling by turns, the whole documentary can now be viewed on YouTube: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. (Bonus link: the director Paul Watson describes the making of 'Mrs Thatcher's least favourite film ever'.)
posted on Apr-9-13 at 3:27 PM
When it first surfaced in 2005, it was hailed as 'the most important Galileo find in more than a century'. Then, in June 2012, news broke on the Ex Libris mailing list that the unique 'proof copy' of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius containing his original drawings of the Moon was in fact a highly sophisticated forgery. The full story is still unclear, but the finger of suspicion points at Marino Massimo de Caro, who in his brief reign as director of the Girolamini Library in Naples removed thousands of rare books in what has been described as a 'premeditated, organised and brutal' sacking of the library. Meanwhile, experts are still marvelling at the quality of the forgery: "We’ve seen missing pages replaced in facsimile, but no one dreamed that an entire book could be forged, something that is now more easily possible because of modern technology."
posted on Apr-4-13 at 3:33 PM
The Rev John Graham (better known as Araucaria) is the most loved, feared and respected of British crossword compilers. Aged 91, and still at the top of his game, his achievements include the 26-letter anagram that some fans have described as 'the best crossword clue ever'. So it was only natural that he should use a set of cryptic clues in one of his own puzzles to break the news that he is dying of cancer.
posted on Jan-12-13 at 1:53 AM
The Geese Book is a lavishly illustrated manuscript of choral music, written for the church of St Lorenz, Nuremberg, between 1504 and 1510. It takes its name from a whimsical illustration showing a choir of geese with a wolf as their choirmaster. The manuscript has now been digitized, and many of the chants recorded, so that you can listen to the music (or even sing along) while following the text. Highlights include Christmas, with a fox and rooster, Ascension Day, with the famous choir of geese, All Saints' Day, with a dragon eating a baby, and the Mass for St Lawrence, with a musical bear.
posted on Nov-29-12 at 3:52 AM
'The life of the city is infinite and unknowable; all we can do is look and report on what we find.' The London Column presents images of the city over the last sixty years, from the Festival of Britain to the present, a highly eclectic mix but with an emphasis on the everyday, the down-at-heel, the neglected and the unexpected. The compiler, David Secombe (formerly of Esoteric London), admits to 'a certain creeping cynicism towards the looming Olympic bunfight'. Like London itself, the site isn't easy to navigate, but the best way to browse is to go to the gallery page and follow the images that take your fancy.
posted on Jul-27-12 at 4:17 AM
"I still buy books faster than I can read them. But this feels completely normal. How weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life." Julian Barnes reflects on his life as a bibliophile, the disappearance of secondhand bookshops and the precarious survival of the physical book.
posted on Jun-30-12 at 1:25 AM
Some of his photographs are odd. Others are just creepy. But thanks to his hobby of photographing young women with a hidden camera, Edward Linley Sambourne (1844-1910) has left us a fascinating series of images of street fashion in Edwardian London. [some photos NSFW]
posted on Apr-10-12 at 1:20 AM
"He is the kind of boy who is bound to be rather a problem in any school or community, being in some respects definitely anti-social." Alan Turing's school reports.
posted on Mar-22-12 at 3:23 AM
The Hatchet Job of the Year Award, sponsored by The Omnivore, is looking for 'the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the last twelve months'. The shortlist includes Geoff Dyer on Julian Barnes ('excellent in its averageness'), Lachlan Mackinnon on Geoffrey Hill ('he is wasting his time and trying to waste ours') and Jenni Russell on Catherine Hakim ('if you should pass it in a bookshop, pick up a copy and drop it somewhere where nobody's likely to take an interest in it'). Mary Beard, another of the shortlisted candidates, insists that 'it's not actually a prize for skewering .. it's for honest as well as entertaining book reviewing, that isn't afraid to go beyond deference, to call a spade a spade'.
posted on Jan-17-12 at 4:22 PM
X-ray technology developed for airport security and bomb disposal is now being used to see beneath the surface of eighteenth-century furniture. The resulting images are unexpectedly clear and often beautiful in themselves, revealing not just nails and screws but also layers of upholstery and even woodworm tunnels. (Via Treasure Hunt, Emile de Bruijn's blog featuring works of art in the National Trust's historic houses.)
posted on Jun-25-11 at 3:37 PM
'The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish.' Daniel Mendelsohn dislikes Mad Men.
posted on Feb-4-11 at 6:03 AM
"Among medieval artistic media it was the microchip": the historian Alexander Murray on ivory carving. The Gothic Ivories Project, a new website launched this week by the Courtauld Institute in London, aims to build a database of every surviving ivory sculpture made in Europe between 1200 and 1530. The 400 objects currently on the site, ranging from combs to chesspieces, include some images of astonishing beauty and intricacy.
posted on Dec-17-10 at 3:09 AM
In December 2008 the journalist Victoria Coren revealed the existence of a bizarre crew of professional gatecrashers, led by ex-magistrate Terence Jolley, who liked to show up at the funerals of people they'd never met, apparently in the hope of cadging some free food and drink. Their activities were exposed after Coren advertised a (fictitious) memorial service for the (imaginary) Sir William Ormerod and waited for the Jolley Gang to fall into the trap (previously on MetaFilter). Now the Jolley Gang are back in the news after one of their number, 'retired banker' Alan MacDonald, gatecrashed a party at the Dorchester Hotel and choked to death on a canapé.
posted on Mar-21-10 at 8:15 AM
'A site dedicated to songs about London. The only rules are that the songs must be brilliant and that the blindingly obvious numbers are excluded.' The London Nobody Sings takes you on a musical tour of the capital, by bus, train and tube, via Camden Town, Parliament Hill, Portobello Road, Shepherd's Bush, Southall, Tottenham and Tooting Broadway. And if it's too late to take the Underground? Don't worry, the trams may have gone, but you can always catch the Nightbus home.
posted on Feb-14-10 at 3:37 AM
Today is the centenary of the Dreadnought Hoax, when a group of pranksters paid a ceremonial visit to the Royal Navy's flagship, HMS Dreadnought, pretending to be the Emperor of Abyssinia and his retinue. The organiser of the hoax was Horace de Vere Cole, an inveterate practical joker whose favourite trick was to 'walk with a cow's udder protruding from his flies and then cut it off with scissors before aghast bystanders'. But one of the other hoaxers went on to become famous for other reasons. Her name? Virginia Woolf.
posted on Feb-7-10 at 12:07 AM
The papers of Edward Alleyn, the Elizabethan actor-manager, are now available online in a digital edition. Most of what we know about the London theatre in the age of Shakespeare comes from this archive; highlights include the only surviving example of a 'part' or script written out for an actor in an Elizabethan play (image) and the contract for building the Fortune playhouse in 1600, just a year after the building of the Globe. Sadly, the archive doesn't include any manuscripts relating to Shakespeare, because Alleyn worked for the Admiral's Men, one of the two main theatre companies in London, whereas Shakespeare worked for the competition (the Lord Chamberlain's Men), though that didn't stop the nineteenth-century forger John Payne Collier from faking a few documents of his own to fill the gap.
posted on Dec-11-09 at 10:32 AM
On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, Lieutenant John Purvis risked court-martial by taking some snapshots of the battlefield. Now his photograph album has been put online. It gives an extraordinary insight into what it was like to be an ordinary soldier in the middle of the battle, marching up to the front, resting in the forward lines, taking cover as a bomb explodes, advancing into battle, watching a shell burst, digging into freshly made trenches, or moving forward over captured ground.
posted on Nov-11-09 at 3:00 AM
London Sound Survey collects the everyday sounds of the capital, including the bells of St Clement's, the call to prayer at the Whitechapel mosque, football fans outside Millwall stadium, a demo in Piccadilly, dubstep at the Notting Hill Carnival and a street preacher at Speaker's Corner.. not forgetting, of course, those ubiquitous sounds of London life, 'Big Issue! Big Issue!' and announcements of planned engineering works on the Tube. (Via.)
posted on Jun-25-09 at 12:23 AM
In 1839, soon after Queen Victoria's accession, the Earl of Eglinton staged a re-enactment of a medieval tournament to mark the beginning of what he hoped would be a new age of chivalry. Despite torrential rain, the Eglinton Tournament was attended by 100,000 people and sparked off a popular craze for all things medieval. A new website tells the story of the tournament and reproduces, for the first time, twenty original watercolours recording the event in all its romantic splendour and absurdity.
posted on Jun-4-09 at 7:06 AM
"Do you love me? Will you answer this all absorbing question the next time we meet? Will you utter that winsome "Yes" fraught with all the golden dreams of heavenly realms, or will you pronounce the dread "No" and consign my soul to darkness and despair?" Advertising for Love, a collection of funny, strange, poignant and bizarre personal ads from nineteenth-century American newspapers.
posted on May-29-09 at 9:03 AM
In 1857, hundreds of strange objects suddenly started appearing in London antique shops: coins and medals, vases and statues, all made out of soft metal with weird designs and cryptic lettering. They were the work of two illiterate London mudlarks, William Smith and Charles Eaton, who managed to fool some of the leading archaeologists of the day into accepting their forgeries as genuine medieval antiquities.
posted on Aug-30-08 at 10:03 AM
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey has been posted (and double-posted) here before, but it's just been given a major upgrade that effectively turns it into a new site, with the addition of 100,000 new trial reports covering the period 1834 to 1913, and the full text of the Newgate Ordinary's Accounts reporting the confessions and last dying speeches of criminals sentenced to death. The thousands of human tragedies recorded in the trial reports (some famous, others forgotten) are fascinating and often deeply moving.
posted on Apr-27-08 at 6:06 AM
Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities features strange and surprising things from the rare book and manuscript collections of the Beinecke Library in Yale, including death masks, the philosophy of origami, the real adventures of Tintin, famous people and their pets, and American transvestite magazines from the 1960s.
posted on Apr-11-08 at 10:40 AM
John Milton was born 400 years ago this year, and several excellent websites have been created to mark the anniversary. Two online exhibitions, Citizen Milton and Living At This Hour, celebrate Milton's achievement with a display of early editions and later artistic interpretations, while Darkness Visible offers an accessible introduction to Paradise Lost for readers encountering the poem for the first time, including an interesting discussion of Milton's influence on Philip Pullman (who responds here with his own tribute to Paradise Lost, 'the greatest poem by England's greatest public poet').
posted on Feb-1-08 at 3:34 AM
The Reading Experience Database is collecting information about 'what British people read, where and when they read it, and what they thought of it' between 1450 and 1945. You can sample the database by searching for reader responses to (e.g.) Shakespeare or Dickens or Karl Marx, or to newspapers in general. It's a collaborative project, open to everyone, so why not contribute?
posted on Jul-26-07 at 6:24 AM
Leonardo comes to life. A stunning collection of short animations based on Leonardo da Vinci's sketchbooks. Watch a man running, a human heart beating, a tank moving, a bird flying, or a geometrical model rotating. Then visit the Universal Leonardo website to find out more about the man himself.
posted on Oct-12-06 at 12:19 PM
The Poetry Archive claims to be "the world's premier online collection of recordings of poets reading their work". The main page will open a RealAudio file whether you want it to or not, so you may prefer to explore the site from one of the inside pages, like the Historic Recordings page, where you can listen to Robert Browning (reciting "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" and forgetting the words halfway through), Alfred Tennyson ("The Charge of the Light Brigade") or W.B. Yeats (sonorously declaiming "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"). Or if you want something more modern, there's Ashbery, Heaney, Logue, Pinter .. (Warning: all links to individual poets have embedded RealAudio files.)
posted on Dec-9-05 at 2:18 AM