history Archives Page 2 of 2

Yearning for Pet Sounds

02/06/2016

Predating instant gratification by decades, Pet Sounds expresses a yearning which still makes for emotional listening. Essay...

David Bowie, Time Travel and a film called Interstellar

29/01/2016

Reminiscences of Bowie are Proustian moments of total recall, but they can also link generations. A story of memory and hope ...

Pagan Britain (and Ronald Hutton)

05/11/2014

Qithin the generous limits imposed by the evidence you're free to imagine the past how you like....

On Troubadours, Sufism and Robert Graves

28/07/2014

The original medieval troubadours, who expounded the art of Courtly Love through poetry and song and who were embroiled with the heretical ideas of gnosticism and Catharism, owed their existence to...

Druids, Magic Mushrooms and Cultural Memory

10/10/2013

Iron Age Druids might have known about and used magic mushrooms even if there's no way of testing it....

Gangsters and Gunslingers : The American Museum in Britain

23/03/2013

Los Angeles was the last Western boom town – a place where elderly cowboys mingled with celluloid stars on Hollywood backlots. Wyatt Earp ended his days there. Gangsters and Gunslingers, at the...

Hoxton (Alco) Hall

05/12/2012

'mysterious ‘Negro delineators’, trapeze artists, jugglers, singers, performing dogs and the like', Hoxton Hall has moved with the times since 1863....