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Picture source This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through Kentish grass-fields: the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable, clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous: he of good birth; she of birth quite as good; each filled with a too good breakfast that each could yet capably digest. […]
Last Post bugle callPicture source Sadly they whispered awayAs I played the last post on the bugleI heard them sayOh that boy’s no different todayExcept in every single way — from “Last Post on the Bugle” by The Libertines It had been obvious to her for a long time that God would one day step […]
Note: see the update for partial clarification The name of Christopher Tietjens’ son in Parade’s End isa) Tommieb) Michaelc) Mark juniord) All of the above The correct answer is D, all of the above. Or at least I think it is. Through Part One, Chapter Four of The Last Post I have seen all three […]
I browsed through the Ford Madox Ford Society’s last online newsletter and noticed in Newsletter 15 (30 March 2009) that “Max Saunders, Joseph Wiesenfarth, Sara Haslam and Paul Skinner are working on an annotated critical edition of Parade’s End (Carcanet)”. It is a work that definitely would benefit the reader. The Last Post seems to […]
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro Simon & Schuster, 352 pages, $26.00 ISBN: 1416541624I enjoyed James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of Shakespeare: 1599 and wanted to read his latest book on Shakespeare as soon as I could. I didn’t realize Wikipedia had a long article on the Shakespeare authorship question as […]
I wanted to take a brief look at some quotes from poems by George Herbert (1593 – 1633) in A Man Could Stand Up: He hoped McKechnie, with his mad eyes and his pestilential accent, would like that fellow. That fellow spread seventeenth-century atmosphere across the landscape over which the sun’s rays were beginning to […]
Picture source Months and months before Christopher Tietjens had stood extremely wishing that his head were level with a particular splash of purposeless whitewash. Something behind his mind forced him to the conviction that, if his head–and of course the rest of his trunk and lower limbs–were suspended by a process of levitation to that […]
The Long Now Blog posted the above CG rendering of a concept for the Stockholm Library. Maybe not practical (yet), but starkly beautiful. Follow their links on the design team and how the design was generated.
Interior of the Gambling House at Wiesbaden Published in Harpers Weekly, October 7, 1871The text (translated by C. J. Hogarth) can be found at Project Gutenberg. The Wikipedia page for the book gives more details than what I provide below. The story behind Dostoevsky writing The Gambler has almost overshadowed the novella itself, which is […]
Bird Life in Wington: Practical Parables for Young People by John Calvin Reid, illustrated by Reynold H. WeidenaarFrom the preface: In seeking to stimulate the interest of children and young people in the worship services of the church, through the years I have used a number of ideas for Sermonettes. Just one has succeeded beyond […]
Well, it seems I can’t stay away from Ford right now. I had trouble starting Some Do Not… and No More Parades, having to read the first ten pages of each book several times before settling into the work. Not so with A Man Could Stand Up. So while I return to Parade’s End, I […]
Virginia Stephen (Woolf) in disguise on the far left, William Horace de Vere Cole in tophat on the far rightSomething a little lighter for today… On February 7, 1910, the HMS Dreadnought hosted a hastily arranged tour of four Abyssinian princes, or so they had been told. It turns out to have been an elaborate […]
Canadian soldiers in a trenchPicture source Tietjens had walked in the sunlight down the lines, past the hut with the evergreen climbing rose, in the sunlight, thinking in an interval good humouredly about his official religion: about the Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English Landowner, benevolently awful, a colossal duke who never […]
Picture source The one thing that stood out sharply in Tietjens’ mind when at last, with a stiff glass of rum punch, his, officer’s pocket-book complete with pencil because he had to draft before eleven a report as to the desirability of giving his unit special lectures on the causes of the war, and a […]
I haven’t mentioned The Neglected Books Page blog yet, but I’ll correct that now. They have linked to an online version of Isabel Paterson’s Never Ask the End. Comments on the book can be found here and here. While I haven’t read the book yet, I hope to correct that soon since every comment I […]
A while back I found a couple of sites that had color photograhs from World War I. I’ll let the sites outline the original sources. It is strange that black & white photos can add a ‘distance’ to the subject matter, both in time and connection, that color seems to ‘cure’. Both pictures here come […]
He said: “Yes I believe I did. I used to despise it, but I’ve come to believe I did…But no! They’ll never let me back. They’ve got me out, with all sorts of bad marks against me. They’ll pursue me systematically…You see, in such a world as this, an idealist–or perhaps it’s only a sentimentalist–must […]
the ache/toská: No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a […]
Picture source Jumping down from the high step of the dog-cart the girl completely disappeared into the silver: she had on an otter-skin toque, dark, that should have been visible. But she was gone more completely than if she had dropped into deep water, into snow–or through tissue paper. More suddenly, at least! In darkness […]
Some Do Not Illustration by Stella BowenNote: check back for updates I will probably stay close to my usual pattern of posting during the read-along for Parade’s End. With “online resources,” I try to find sites or pages that are useful in understanding a work. If anyone would like to add a resource to these […]