609 words
Avner rustled the Evening News, pursing fat lips to speak. “I say Machen’s got a damn fine piece about ghostly bowmen saving the boys at Mons in the paper!” Then, folding the page, he proffered, “Given the Boche a right bloody nose!” (more…)
“Major Robert Rogers & an Indian Chief,” from Fort Ticonderoga: A Short History by S. H. P. Pell.
6,042 words
“Their captain was Robert Rogers, of New Hampshire, – a strong, well-knit figure, in dress and appearance more woodsman than soldier . . . He was ambitious and violent, yet able in more ways than one, by no means uneducated, and so skilled in woodcraft, so energetic and resolute, that his services were invaluable.”
–Francis Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe (1885) (more…)
6,373 words
To Father Paul Laforgue, the Algonkian Indians are savage pagans in dire need of salvation
To the Algonkian Indians, Catholic priests are greedy, selfish, Norman pigs of sorcerers
–An excerpt from the back cover of the 1987 Paladin edition of Black Robe (more…)
1,944 words
We are the last people on earth, and the last to be free: our very remoteness in a land known only to rumour has protected us up till this day. Today the furthest bounds of Britain lie open – and everything unknown is given an inflated worth. But now there is no people beyond us, nothing but tides and rocks . . . (more…)
3,550 words
‘I never felt magic crazy as this
I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea
But now you’re here
Brighten my northern sky’
6,029 words
Part 3 of 3. Part 1 here. Part 2 here.
‘Now We Rise and We Are Everywhere’ — Nick Drake (1948-1974)
And having now evoked the legend of King Arthur, Merlin, Excalibur, and the Holy Grail, I can clearly recall driving one autumn morning down the A39 as it snaked its way through the Mendip hills. The Somerset Levels cloaked in thick fog with just the Tor floating above the ancient town of Glastonbury. (more…)
6,052 words
“There’s a feeling I get when I look to the West.”–“Stairway to Heaven,” Led Zeppelin IV
It was with the advent of Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762) that a direct link was first made between national culture and the simplicity of peasant life. (more…)
4,307 words
Part, the first — Roots & Rituals
Time will pass away
Time will guard our secret
I’ll return again
To fight another day
I’d have to be a warrior
A slave I couldn’t be
A soldier and a conqueror
Fighting to be free
—Warrior, Wishbone Ash, 1972 (more…)
2,012 words
Moscow and Peter’s grad, the city of Constantine,
these are the capitals of the Russian kingdom.
But where is their limit? And where are their frontiers
to the north, the east, the south and the setting sun?
The Fate will reveal this to future generations.
Seven inland seas and seven great rivers
from Nile to Neva, from Elbe to China,
from Volga to the Euphrates, from Ganges to Danube.
That’s the Russian kingdom, and let it be forever, (more…)
Bolshoi Zlatoust Church in Yekaterinburg
876 words
I walked amid thousands of pilgrims carrying icons and clutching crosses close to their breasts in the shadow of the bell tower of the Bolshoi Zlatoust church. The magnificent Russo-Byzantine edifice, now bathed in silver starlight, having been so faithfully reconstructed in 2010 after the communists had blasted Saint Maximian’s holy place with dynamite some eighty years before to make way for a statue to their new gods, Lenin and Stalin.
2,593 words
I like beer, and I like cheese
I like the smell of a westerly breeze
But what I like more than all of these
Is to be on horseback.
Hey and away we go
Through the grass, across the snow
Big brown beastie, big brown face
I’d rather be with you than flying through space (more…)
5,113 words
Left/Right dichotomies in the representation of female militants in the movies The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) and A Student named Alexander (2011).