Thursday, November 13, 2025

If these pages survive me

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‘I write because I cannot stop writing; it is the last habit that still feels like freedom. If these pages survive me, let them tell only th...
Tuesday, November 11, 2025

Found mine field with Bosch notice

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‘Started forward at 6 a.m. H plus ½ hour. Heavy fog. Found men coming back and took them along with me. Heavy fire all around from m.g. Foun...
Wednesday, October 29, 2025

The bishop in Buganda

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James Hannington, Bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa, was shot dead 140 years ago today, with his own rifle, executed - along with 50 or so...
Sunday, October 19, 2025

Live ten times happier

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Jonathan Swift, that great Anglo-Irish satirist, man of pamphlets, died 280 years ago. His name is best remembered for Gulliver’s Travels , ...
Thursday, October 16, 2025

Crusell the clarinettist

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Today marks 250 years since the birth of Bernhard Henrik Crusell, the Finnish-Swedish clarinettist and composer whose travel journals and au...
Sunday, October 12, 2025

Do what thou wilt

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‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law [. . .] I am aflame with the brandy of the thought that I am the sublimest Mystic in all hi...
Saturday, October 11, 2025

Burning at the heart

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François Mauriac, a French novelist and Nobel Prize winner barely read in the English world, was born 130 years ago today. As an old man eme...
Sunday, October 5, 2025

Encountering the natives

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‘It appeared, that the natives entertained the idea, that our clothes were impervious to spears, and had therefore determined on a trial of ...