The iPhone is a wondrous thing. People rave about it, but would anyone consider writing a poem about it? That's very unlikely. Poetry still exists, but it has been almost entirely subsumed into musical lyrics given to us by the relative few who write the songs we hear. Lyrics can speak to the hea...
Its starts OK but when it reaches Humphrey Davy, I felt it got lost with too much poetry and details of his romantic life, and too little actual science. For example it goes on and on with how Davys wife didn' get along with Faraday, but then Faradays work on electromagnetism, which had without ...
Rich,I know that you're reading this. You have spent your life wondering why nobody except the NYRB has acknowledged your first study, Shelley: The Pursuit. Perhaps you've outdone Ellmann, and you've found the decadeslong hardway: Western society worships Joyce. He was homeless, drunk, blind, pur...
It was a formal Friday Night Discourse, with an invited audience in evening dress, and I was asked to put on an unaccustomed dinner jacket and bow tie. My announced subject was ‘The Coleridge Experiment’. The aim was to explore that particularly controversial meeting between science and poetry wh...
By Haldane’s time there were three distinct strands in the volunteer and auxiliary forces of the Crown, and the Norfolk Committee, one of the bodies which had investigated British military performance in the Boer War, had concluded that between them they were neither fitted for taking the field a...
Although the Japanese began their 1904–5 war with Russia by sinking the Russian Asian Fleet in harbour, the principal US naval base in the Pacific at Pearl Harbor was completely unprepared for the Japanese attack of 7 December 1941. As the attack was so politically advantageous to Roosevelt, susp...
Some British officers in India held appointments on the staff, while others commanded British or native troops. But one distinctive characteristic of India was that military officers were used to fill a number of administrative, judicial and diplomatic posts. They were the ‘politicals’, military ...
A biographer who sought to present his readers with Marlborough’s political and military identities in parallel would be forced to intersperse correspondence on strategic policy, tactical detail, administrative minutiae, cabinet reshuffles, borough-mongering and monarch-management. The fact that ...
443. 2 John Wilson Croker The Croker Papers: The Correspondence and Diaries of John Wilson Croker, Secretary to the Admiralty from 1809 to 1830 (3 vols, London 1885) vol. III p. 28. 3 Elizabeth Longford Wellington: Pillar of the State (London 1972) p. 148. 4 Elizabeth Longford Wellington: Y...