But By Jingo If We Don’t: Kipling Bowdlerized, 1897-9

(Anyone with the slightest interest in Kipling will enjoy Mathew Lyons’ two pieces at Normblog: Mathew Lyons on ‘Kipling and His Critics’ and Mathew Lyons on The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling . Much more Lyons via his excellent and recommended Twitter feed.) Perhaps they thought it reduced the value, because I picked it up for a couple of…

Peaking Too Soon: The 3 Great King Oliver Recordings

There was an EP of his amongst my father’s records, so I must have first come across King Oliver on one of those blank mid-1980s summer afternoons when everyone else was out and there was nothing else to do.   There’s always a sense of curtailment about a parent’s record collection. At least, there was…

Wodehouse, Ghosts and My Grandfather

  The first time it happened was at my great-grandfather’s terraced house in Black Tom in the years immediately prior to the Great War. There’d been a death in the family, and then a funeral. My grandmother and her five sisters shared a bedroom, and sat up late into the night, or must have done,…

Decline, Satire and the Railway Series of the Rev. W. Awdry

You don’t get to choose the books you learn to read from, but they can stay with you for life. I was given the basics elsewhere, but once I knew the ropes, the Reverend W. Awdrey’s “Railway Series” set me properly on my way. You may not have met these. You will have if you’ve…

Three Easy Pieces: American Music In Colour, 1929-30

  From about 1914 on, you can almost feel colour film trying to make itself happen. Any list of early colour feature films has the same air to it of frustration and heartbreak: “technicolor inserts” in this movie or that, which is also listed as “Lost Film” or “Extant only in Black and White.” Three…

“Now, Don’t Make Me Laugh, Old Boy!” : British Historical Sound Recordings 1890-1950

It’s true to say that the United Kingdom never really threw itself into sound recording experiments with the gusto of the United States, but nonetheless there are some fascinating survivals, and we’re going to showcase five of them here. They encompass government, domesticity, transport, street soundscapes and industrialization and each has its own story to…

Haydn on Midland Road: Culture In and Out of Context

At 1’13” in the video below, a young man in black pulls himself off the wall to the right and crosses the road in front of the car. It’s an anxious gait he has, and a disassociated, almost dazed expression. I can remember feeling like that once. As well I might, because that young man…