]]>]]>
If Julian Assange edited The Reader's Digest, it might look like a bit like The Public Domain Review (except with fewer crying interns and less extradition.)
The Review pretty much describes itself - books, films and audio already in the public domain, made accessible with contextualizing essays and introductions from writers such as Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina and Lucy Worsley. Today, they put up the full text of Charles Dickens' The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi with an introduction by me. Therein, you may discover the difference between hardship and tinsel.
]]>
You can barely flee down a city block these days without running smack into the middle of the newest zombie apocalypse, a genre usually traced back to Richard Matheson’s 1954 survivor novel, I Am Legend, but which finds a much more venerable precursor in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.
]]>Professor James Moriaty (d.1893): "The Napoleon of Crime"
Adam Wayne (1904): "The Napoleon of Notting Hill"
Frederick Huth (1777-1864): "The Napoleon of the City"
Bernard Quaritch (1819-1899): "The Napoleon of Booksellers"
Sir Edmund Davis (1861-1939): "The Napoleon of Finance"
Henry Vardon (1870-1937): "The Napoleon of Golf"
July 1898: Bob Hunting, owner and clown of Hunting Brothers’ Circus shoots his bandleader for trying to organize a musicians’ strike to protest against unpaid wages.
July 1926: Detective Story Magazine publishes the first installment of Johnston McCulley’s “The Crimson Clown” series. The stories feature the adventures of Dalton Prouse, a bachelor and war veteran who wears a tight-fitting silk clown costume beneath his clothes in order to slip into the criminal underworld.
March 1953: First recorded instance of an armed robbery committed by a man in a clown mask. An unknown assailant robs the Sheridan Standard Service Station, Chicago, binding the attendant and making away with $148.
Just a few of the many true-life clown-related atrocities I compiled for Issue 42 of Cabinet. Out now, bookshops.
The most notable meal in the history of English Romantic poetry took place on a Sunday afternoon in late December, 1817 as a garrulous group of men assembled at the London home of the artist, Benjamin Robert Haydon.
The guests included William Wordsworth, the essayist Charles Lamb, one of Haydon’s models, a gatecrasher, and a young unknown named John Keats. According to Haydon’s diary, it was a great success—a big boozy incitement full of laughter, argument, and discussion of topics as diverse as Homer, mathematics, and postage stamps—all in the shadow of the host’s enormous, jostling masterpiece, Christ’s Entry Into Jerusalem, which hung on the dining-room wall.
]]>
Tucked inside it was a cutting from the Nottingham Weekly Guardian for 1st July 1939, describing the moment Canon T. G. Barber of Hucknall Church unsealed the Byron family vault to examine the poet’s remains.
Dipsomaniacs are particularly well-represented, and among the best of them was Christian IV, King of Denmark, and brother-in-law to James I. When Christian paid a visit it was tempting to hide behind the sofa, as it wasn’t just boring middle-class talk about mortgages one had to endure, but whole weeks of life-threatening benders.
]]>
]]>