To become a fixture in history is a luck lottery. Some have it; most don’t. Fame comes in many guises. Captain Scott and General Custer were famous for just one episode – dying. Heroically? Probably not in either case, as it happens. The mood of the times buoyed up their exploits and carried them forward.… Continue reading Some have greatness thrust upon them
Author: martin_hedges
If I ruled the World
The talk these days is about caliphates and demagogues whose aspiration is to stage a bizarre rerun of the Crusades. My book An Infinite Deal of Nothing, coming out in August, is the untold story about two of the most outrageous attempts at international financial fraud across the 19th century. Stick with me here, this… Continue reading If I ruled the World
Ice cold in Bloomsbury
“The profession’s overcrowded and the struggle’s pretty tough…” Noel Coward’s advice to stage mother Mrs Worthington on thespian ambition for her young Mam’selle applies equally to getting work published. There are just too many books these days. And if there is any justice in this life, a number of published authors have totted up more… Continue reading Ice cold in Bloomsbury
Hey son, would you mind risking your life?
In 1886, when photographic pioneer Henry Hamilton Bennett wanted an action shot to demonstrate his new camera shutter truly captured fast action motion, he got his son Ashley to do this. These days he’d be arrested for child endangerment, but you sort of feel that Ashley loved it too. You wonder what Mrs Bennett had… Continue reading Hey son, would you mind risking your life?
Are we drowning in news?
If your street is the ever at the epicentre of a breaking news story, there you will find them — reporters with nothing to report. Lined up like fairground barkers, their arms flapping uncontrollably, as if playing an imaginary concertina to a Stockhausen refrain that sounds somewhere deep in their brain stem, they deliver fact-light,… Continue reading Are we drowning in news?
How 19th-century color dictionaries painted the language of hues used today
Who knew…? How 19th-century color dictionaries painted the language of hues used today.
From a Distance
It is easy to forget the state of research in the 19th century — a world that would be so unfamiliar to us now. Information was local and only held in someone’s memory, or on paper. Much information was so local it tended to stay local. A story might appear in a local paper, but… Continue reading From a Distance
Amor vincit omnia
In my formative years I first encountered the phrase amor vincit omnia – love conquers all. I found the expression in Chaucer. (I tried to apply the incantation, though I could not make it work for me. These truths we hold to be self-evident that amor non vincit Judith Gibbons – unless foreplay counted). As… Continue reading Amor vincit omnia