General Charles O’Hara and the Surrender of Lord Cornwallis

Today marks two-hundred-and-forty-one years since the British general Lord Cornwallis surrendered to a joint Rebel-French force at Yorktown in Virginia — perhaps the most embarrassing British defeat until the Fall of Singapore to the Japanese more than a century and a half later.

Every American schoolboy, or indeed any visitor to the United States Capitol, is familiar with John Trumbull’s oil painting of the scene at Yorktown.

Somewhat pitifully, Lord Cornwallis pled ill health and did not attend the formal ceremony of surrender.

Instead, he sent his adjutant to act on his behalf: a wily character by the name of General Charles O’Hara.

O’Hara had soldiering in his blood, being the illegitimate son of a Portuguese woman and Field Marshal the Rt Hon James O’Hara, 2nd Baron Tyrawley and 1st Baron Kilmaine. The elder O’Hara was the sometime envoy-extraordinary to the King of Portugal, where he made the acquaintance of the woman who bore him one of at least three of his sons-born-the-other-side-of-the-blanket.

Lord Tyrawley looked after his son, sending him to Westminster School before buying him an army commission and keeping him close by in the Coldstream Guards which the father commanded himself.

Young Charles was at one point sent on assignment to Senegal commanding a corps of African army convicts which, reading between the lines, may have been a punishing demotion.

He soon regained his command with the Guards though and was sent to America where the royal troops were fighting against a surprisingly cohesive force of rebel English colonists.

Despite being surrounded by numerous American loyalists, O’Hara tended to distrust the colonists and viewed them with suspicion, tarring them all with the brush of rebellion openly practiced only by a distinct (but ultimately successful) minority.

He was wounded at the Battle of Guildford Court House in March 1781, and by the Siege of Yorktown had been promoted to Cornwallis’s second-in-command. (more…)

For much of Manhattan’s early colonial history, the island was home to two primary settlements: the port of New Amsterdam (later, from 1664, New York) way down at the southern tip and the town of Harlem up where the East River meets the Harlem River.

Christened after the Dutch city, Harlem is one of Manhattan’s most visible links to the Netherlands. The local newspaper is even called the New York Amsterdam News, once a prominent voice in Black America given this neighbourhood became predominantly African-American in the early twentieth century, and Amsterdam Avenue runs up as the spine of West Harlem.

Harlem was founded in 1658, thirty-four years after New Amsterdam was founded and thirty-two since Peter Minuit bought the whole island of Mannahatta off the Indians for sixty guilders.

The town’s first church was founded in 1660 but didn’t have its own dedicated building for a few years. The Harlem Reformed Dutch Church, or Collegiate Church of Harlem, was built in 1665-67 right on the banks of the Harlem River, around the site of East 127th Street and First Avenue today.

Both the building and site was abandoned twenty years later when the congregation moved to its second building, completed 1687, just a little bit further south — near where East 125th meets First Avenue, or where the entrance ramp to the Triborough Bridge meets 125th.

It is this second building, which is depicted in the view above of Harlem village from Morissania across the river in the Bronx in 1765 (below).

(more…)

A century-old geopolitical cartoon is updated for today

Tse Tsan-tai — or 謝纘泰 if you fancy — was by any standard a remarkable man. Born in New South Wales, this Chinese-Australian Christian was a colonial bureaucrat, nationalist revolutionary, constitutional monarchist, pioneer of airship theory, and co-founded the South China Morning Post — still one of the most prominent newspapers in the Orient.

Tse’s most important visual contribution was a widely distributed political cartoon usually known in English as ‘The Situation in the Far East’ or in Chinese as the ‘Picture of Current Times’ (below).

Crafted as a propaganda measure to warn his fellow Chinese of the designs of foreign powers, the cartoon depicts the perils facing the Middle Kingdom.

Japan, with its expanding navy, proclaims it will watch the seas with its ally, Great Britain. The Russian bear looms from Siberia, crossing the border into China. A British lion sprawls over the land, its tail tied up by the “German Sausage Ambitions” at Tsingtao. The French frog guards Indochina while the American eagle lurks from the Philippines.

Meanwhile, the Chinese figures show sleeping bureaucrats and carousing intelligentsia unresponsive to the external threats.

Now the exiled Hong Kong artist Ah To (阿塗) has updated ‘Situation’ to reflect the realities of 2022. (more…)

The revered Sovereign’s death was announced in the evening. The daily anxieties of the people and the press’s usual reporting on quotidian political strife temporarily evaporated on contact with the momentous royal bereavement. Though long anticipated, the loss was profound, raw.

To many it felt like a moment of overdue reckoning. As if the frail body of the elderly monarch had somehow been holding the great, ancient, long-weakening and precariously multinational state together. The world of the previous century had finally, almost imperceptibly, slipped away. Franz Joseph was dead. …

In the October 2022 number of The Critic, Dr John Ritzema explores the parallels between the recent demise of our late sovereign with the death of the Emperor Franz Joseph over a hundred years earlier — and wonders whether there are any lessons for the reign of King Charles III: Rebuilding a Monarchy and a Nation.

One of those minor curiosities that both Franz Joseph and Elizabeth II were succeeded by Charleses — the latter by her son, and the former by his grand-nephew Blessed Charles of Austria.

Out with the old, in with the new: the King has released his new royal cypher, with a stylised CR III replacing the familiar EIIR. As with so many things, I am sure we will get used to it with time.

Given the longevity of the late Queen’s reign it will be some time before we see it appearing on pillarboxes, but it will enter our lives more quickly via postal franking, stamps, currency, and uniforms.

Many are trying to come up with complex, almost mystical, explanations for why St Edward’s Crown has been replaced with the Tudor crown atop the cypher. More likely, I suspect, is that it is a useful means of giving the new reign a respectful visual differentiation from its preceding one.

I’ve always been rather fond of the Tudor crown, and the Caledonian version of the new cypher rightly includes the Crown of Scotland — the oldest amidst the Crown Jewels of this realm as (unlike England) Scotland was spared the iconoclastic destruction of Cromwell’s republic.

The new royal cypher, left, and its Scottish variant, right.

A king is a king, not because he is rich and powerful, not because he is a successful politician, not because he belongs to a particular creed or to a national group. He is king because he is born.

And in choosing to leave the selection of their head of state to this most common denominator in the world — the accident of birth — Canadians implicitly proclaim their faith in human equality, their hope for the triumph of nature over political manoeuvre, over social and financial interest; for the victory of the human person.

— Fr Jacques Monet SJ FRSC

I’m sure I wasn’t the only twelve-year-old whose favourite book was Edward Luttwak’s delicious Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook — an excellent gift from my father. The work gave me a lifelong fascination with the golpe de Estado, a phenomenon of government all too increasingly a rare species in our post-Cold War era.

Just about everything written or said by Luttwak — lately a cattle farmer in Paraguay — is worth reading or listening to. For a start you could read his contributions to the LRB or to the excellent American Jewish Tablet magazine.

I have been waiting for someone to offer a refutation of his provocative Prospect essay on how the Middle East is less relevant than ever, and it would be better for everyone if the rest of the world learned to ignore it.

David Samuels chat with Luttwak this month on the subject of the Three Blind Kings — Putin, Biden, and Xi — offers some superb insights as well as amusements.

Among the lessons that Luttwak is keen to drive home — and he says so over and over and over again on Twitter — is that American intelligence-gathering (and government in general) is too reliant on technology with too few officials, analysts, and operatives actually learning the language of those they are attempting to surveil.

That this state of monolingual limitation was not always the case was driven home in an excellent piece by Jonathan Gaisman in the February 2022 New Criterion concerning Sir Ronald Storrs (left, 1881–1955) — “the most brilliant Englishman in the Near East” as Lawrence of Arabia called him.

An accomplished Arabist, Storrs served as Oriental Secretary for the British administration in Egypt before going on to become Military Governor of Jerusalem, Governor of Cyprus, and Governor of Northern Rhodesia, from which role he retired on health grounds, returned to the metropole, and served a few years on London County Council.

Gaisman relays this delicious anecdote from the British official’s 1937 autobiography Orientations:

Sometime in 1906 I was walking in the heat of the day through the Bazaars. As I passed an Arab café an idle wit, in no hostility to my straw hat but desiring to shine before his friends, called out in Arabic, “God curse your father, O Englishman.”

I was young then and quicker-tempered, and foolishly could not refrain from answering in his own language that I would also curse his father if he were in a position to inform me which of his mother’s two and ninety admirers his father had been.

I heard footsteps behind me and slightly picked up the pace, angry with myself for committing the sin [of] a row with Egyptians. In a few seconds I felt a hand on each arm. “My brother,” said the original humorist, “return, I pray you, and drink with us coffee and smoke. I did not think that Your Worship knew Arabic, still less the correct Arabic abuse, and we would fain benefit further by your important thoughts.”

Gaisman further spoils us with another excellent story — this time about Storrs’ predecessor as Oriental Secretary in Cairo, Mr Harry Boyle:

[Boyle] was taking his tea one day on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel when he heard himself accosted by a total stranger: “Sir, are you the Hotel pimp?”

“I am, Sir,” Boyle replied without hesitation or emotion, “but the management, as you may observe, are good enough to allow me the hour of five to six as a tea interval. If, however, you are pressed perhaps you will address yourself to that gentleman,” and he indicated [the self-made tea magnate] Sir Thomas Lipton, “who is taking my duty; you will find him most willing to accommodate you in any little commissions of a confidential character which you may see fit to entrust to him.”

Boyle then paid his bill, and stepped into a cab unobtrusively, but not too quickly to hear the sound of a fracas, the impact of a fist and the thud of a ponderous body on the marble floor.

Boyle’s 1937 obituary in the Palestine Post noted he was “a gifted linguist, speaking no fewer than twelve languages”. When Lord Cromer was Britain’s proconsul in Egypt, he and Boyle were such frequent perambulators along the Nile that Boyle earned the nickname Enoch, for he “walked daily with the Lord”.

During these walks, Cromer was keen to mix with Egyptians of the most humble backgrounds and was aided by Boyle’s linguistic skills. Such was his excellence in Arabic that, returning to Egypt many years later, Boyle was recognised by a peasant farmer many miles outside of Cairo and warmly embraced as the man who used to walk the Nile with the British lord.

“In the hot and brooding nights of the Egyptian summer,” the Post appreciation also relates, “when all who were at liberty to do so had fled to cooler climes, Cromer and Harry Boyle might often have been seen seated after dinner on the veranda of the Agency in Cairo reading aloud alternately passages from the Iliad.”

Perhaps all is not lost. While I can’t speak for the state of the gift of tongues at Langley, at least the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom can launch into Homer, in Greek, from memory.

But Luttwak would surely be right to retort that it is among the mid-level officials and analysts that linguistic skills are most missing — nor are we currently threatened by Athens, Sparta, or Corinth.

The events of May 1968 have been fetishised by the romantic radical left but ended in the triumph of the popular democratic right. Battered by two world wars, France had enjoyed an unprecedented rise in living standards since 1945 — especially among the poorest and most hard-working — and a new generation untouched by the horrors of war and occupation had risen to adulthood (in age if not in maturity). The ranks of the middle class swelled as more and more people enjoyed the material benefits of an increasingly consumerised society, while those left behind shared the same aspirations of moving on up.

Like any decadent bourgeois cause, the spark of the May events was neither high principle nor addressing deep injustice but rather more base impulses: male university students at Nanterre were upset they were restricted from visiting female dormitories (and that female students were restricted from visiting theirs). The ensuing events involved utopian manifestos, barricades in the streets, workers taking over their factories, a day-long general strike and several longer walkouts across the country.

The French love nothing more than a good scrap, especially when it’s their fellow Frenchmen they’re fighting against. Working-class police beat up middle-class radicals but for much of the month both sides made sure to finish in time for participants on either side to make it home before the Métro shut for the evening. But workers’ strikes meant everyday life was being disrupted, not just the studies of university students. When concessions from Prime Minister Georges Pompidou failed to calm the situation there were fears that the far-left might attempt a violent overthrow of the state.

De Gaulle himself, having left most affairs in Pompidou’s hands, finally came down from his parnassian heights to take charge but then suddenly disappeared: the government was unaware of the head of state’s location for several tense hours.

It turned out the General had flown to the French army in Germany, ostensibly to seek reassurance that it would back the Fifth Republic if called upon to defend the constitution. De Gaulle is said to have greeted General Massu, commander of the French forces in West Germany, “So, Massu — still an asshole?” “Oui, mon général,” Massu replied. “Still an asshole, still a Gaullist.”

The morning of 30 May 1968, the unions led hundreds of thousands of workers through the streets of Paris chanting “Adieu, de Gaulle!” The police kept calm, but the capital was tense and there was a sense that things were getting out of hand. Pompidou convinced de Gaulle the Republic needed to assert itself.

Threatened by a radicalised minority, de Gaulle called upon the confidence of the ordinary people of France. At 4:30 he spoke on the radio briefly, announcing that he was calling for fresh elections to parliament and asserting he was staying put and that “the Republic will not abdicate”.

Before the General even spoke some his supporters (organised by the ever-capable Jacques Foccart) were already on the avenues but the short four-minute broadcast inspired teeming masses onto the streets of central Paris, marching down the Champs-Élysées in support of de Gaulle.

(more…)

General James C. McConville, Chief of Staff of the United States Army, dropped into London this week to meet with General Sir Patrick Sanders, who will take over as his British opposite number (Chief of the General Staff) later this year.

Both are the head of their countries’ respective armies and subordinate to overall defence chiefs, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the US and the Chief of the Defence Staff here in the United Kingdom.

General McConville was welcomed to the official Army Headquarters at Horse Guards, Whitehall, by the Major General Commanding the Household Division, Maj. Gen. Chris Ghika.

A contingent from the Coldstream Guards and the Band of the Irish Guards put together a ceremonial display and Gen. McConville took the salute.

Gen. McConville will also deliver the Kermit Roosevelt Lecture at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst this week.

The general’s visit provided a chance to show off the US Army’s new service uniform — modelled on the popular old pinks and greens.

This provides a much welcome alternative to the Dress Blues which, to my mind, make soldiers look like glorified policemen.

As I wrote when discussing similar changes in Peru, it’s not turning the clock back: it’s choosing a better future.

There are almost as many Londons as there are Londoners. There’s Shakespeare’s London, Pepys’s London, Johnson’s London — even fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes have their own London.

The city of Saint Thomas More takes form in a representation made by the excellent map designer Mike Hall, Harlow-born but now based in Valencia.

This map was commissioned from Hall by the Centre for Thomas More Studies in Texas and the designer based the view and the colour scheme on Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg’s map of London from their 1617 Civitates Orbis Terrarum

From his birthplace in Milk Street to the site of his execution, all the sites from the great points of More’s life are here in this map.

The future Lord Chancellor was educated at the school founded by the Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony, one of the best in the City of London, and when he finished at Oxford returned to London to study law at New Hall and Lincoln’s Inn.

Crosby Place, the house that he bought in 1523 is not far from St Anthony’s School though its surviving remnant was moved brick by brick to Cheyne Walk in 1910 — a site close to More’s Chelsea residence of Beaufort House.

The chapel of Ely Place — town palace of the Bishop of Ely — still survives as St Etheldreda’s, the only mediæval church in London now in use as a Catholic parish.

God’s own Borough of Southwark gets a look in as well, with the Augustinian priory of St Mary Overs (now the Protestant cathedral of Southwark) and the town palace of the bishops of Winchester. Remnants of the great hall of Winchester Palace remains standing to this day.

As is the mapmaker’s privilege, Mr Hall has taken some liberties: in order to fit Lambeth Palace — the residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury (and Primate of All England) he’s shifted it a bit north of its actual spot.

I wish he’d kept the Rose and Globe theatres which he included in his initial sketch for the map — Southwark was the theatre district of its day.

Hall also completed a sketch of Beaufort House as it would have appeared during St Thomas More’s lifetime. The house was demolished in 1740, and today’s Beaufort Street runs the line of the main drive leading up to it.

The Church of All Saints at Chelsea (now known as Chelsea Old Church) is at the bottom of the sketch and is where the More family burial vault is. His severed head is believed to be entombed there to this day.

The Connecticut town of Lebanon is known for many things. It is the birthplace of Jonathan Trumbull, the only colonial governor to turn traitor during the American Revolution, as well as of his son the famous painter. The Rev. Eleazar Wheelock founded Moor’s Charity School in the town to teach Native Americans, later moving it to New Hampshire where it became Dartmouth College. Prince Saunders, the Free Black socialite and later Attorney General of the Empire of Haiti, was probably born in Lebanon too.

The town’s most famous feature, however, is its mile-long town green: the longest village common in the world. New England is famous for its town and village greens, originally enclosed land held in common and put to practical use for locals to use as pasture for their animals. Given the size of farms in New England, this purpose quickly faded and the green became a meeting or strolling place. Usually the most important buildings could be found either on or bordering the green: the church, the school, the town hall or court house, and eventually the library.

Part of Lebanon Green is still worked as a hay field, which means this is the last town green in New England that is still in agricultural use. There is even an adjacent vineyard, God bless them.

The green also provoked a recent legal case of some interest. When the Town of Lebanon proposed expanding the public library, located right on the green alongside the Congregationalist church, a problem arose.

Before a permit could be issued, the State of Connecticut required proof of ownership of the land on which the library to be submitted. Alas, no proof could be found, the green having been held in common more or less from the town’s incorporation in 1700.

The last known owners of the green were believed to be the town proprietors listed in 1705, and delineating their heirs or assigns over the dozen or more generations that had passed in the meantime was deemed impossible, or at least strenuous beyond any desirable effort. The town historian estimated there may be as many as 10,000 descendants with a potential claim.

In January 2018, the Town of Lebanon instead requested the court grant them quiet title to three parcels of the town green hosting the library, the town hall, and the town’s public works facilities. In March 2019, their request was granted, and the First Congregational Church likewise took legal action to see it recognised as the owner of the parcel of the green it has occupied for centuries.

Courts have also granted the local historical society conservation authority over 95 per cent of the green — excluding the church, town hall, and library. This means the local histos will have a say on any future use, though the courts declined extending this to the whole of the green. So it looks like the future of Lebanon Green will be safe for some centuries yet.

One of the great Northumbrian traditions is the yearly Scoring the Hales, a mediaeval football match between the parishes of St Michael and St Paul in Alnwick. The first records of this match are from 1762 but it almost certainly began many, many generations earlier. This year’s match marked a return after a two-year absence thanks to the virus.

The match takes place every Shrove Tuesday but this is football as seen long before the modern rules of the sport were codified into ‘soccer’ (association football) and ‘rugger’ (rugby football).

The day begins with the Duke of Northumberland dropping the ball from the barbican of his seat, Alnwick Castle. Led by the Duke’s piper, the two teams are led down the Peth to the furlong-deep pitch beside the River Aln called the Pastures.

Rules are very few but the match consists of two teams of usually about 150 players from their respective parishes, battling it out over two halves of half-an-hour each. The goal posts are covered with greenery and stand 400 yards apart. Whoever scores two ‘hales’ first is deemed the winner. If the score is even after two periods, a further 45-minute period decides the match.

Once the match is over, the football is then thrown in the River Aln and all the players scramble to capture it and whoever gets it through the river to the other bank is allowed to keep it.

Like golf, Scoring the Hales used to be played in the streets but its destructive potential has seen it moved to an open space — here in Alnwick’s case since the 1820s.

The Newcastle Chronicle (founded 1764) sent a photographer along to this year’s match, duly won by the denizens of St Paul’s parish. (more…)

The soi-disant “Catholic Apostolic Church” was one of the strangest but most fascinating Protestant sects the Victorian world brought forth. It was entirely novel — perhaps outright bizarre is a better description — in its combination of millenarian theology, evangelical preaching, and inventive ceremonialism. They were often referred to as Irvingites as a shorthand, owing to their origins amongst the followers of the Rev. Edward Irving, a Church of Scotland minister who led a congregation in Regent Square, London.

The Irvingites — after the death of Irving, it must be said — invented an elaborate hierarchy of twelve “apostles”, under whom served “angels”, “priests”, “elders”, “prophets”, “evangelists”, “pastors”, “deacons”, “sub-deacons”, “acolytes”, “singers”, and “door-keepers”. Coming from a very Protestant, low-church background, they curiously concocted elaborate liturgies influenced by Catholic, Greek, and Anglican forms of worship.

Another unique aspect of this group was its lack of denominational thinking: the Catholic Apostolic Church did not demand any strict or exclusive communion but was happy for its members and supporters to continue to be members of other churches or denominations.

One of the founding “apostles” of the Irvingite Church, Henry Drummond, married his daughter off to Algernon Percy, later the 6th Duke of Northumberland. That duke and his two immediate successors were known to be supporters of the Catholic Apostolic Church without disowning their established Anglican affiliation.

Despite this aristocratic land-owning connection, socially the Irvingite church spread most rapidly amongst the well-to-do mercantile classes, which meant they had congregations in places like Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Edinburgh, and even Hamburg. They were also very strict about tithing, which — combined with their mercantile status — meant they had a fair amount of money to spend on church building.

In Liverpool their church was built on the corner of Canning Street and Catherine Street in 1855-56. The design by architect Enoch Trevor Owen was influenced by Cologne Cathedral, with a nave more than 70 feet high.

Owen later moved to Dublin where he was employed as architect to the Board of Works, though he also designed the Catholic Apostolic Church in that city as well. (Today that building serves as Dublin’s Lutheran Church.) There’s some indication he designed the Catholic Apostolic Church in Manchester, so he might very well have been a member of the sect himself.

Another centrally important fact about the Irvingites: they didn’t believe that their original “apostles” could appoint further apostles. So when the last living “apostle” ordained his last “angel”, no further angels and so forth could be created. It endowed the clergy of this unique branch of Protestantism with an effective end date, but you have to give them credit for sticking with it. The last “apostle” died in 1901, the last “angel” in 1960, and their last “priest” in 1971.

Gone are all their elaborate inventive liturgies, and unsurprisingly the congregations have tended to fade away as well. The last clergy often recommended the lay people in their charge attend Church of England services when their own services stopped. The body continues to exist, and beside paying for the maintenance of its properties also makes annual grants to mostly Anglican but also Catholic and Eastern Orthodox bodies. In some very rare places, like Little Venice, prayer services are still held.

Indeed they still own their great central church in Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, though its chief use in the past decades has been being rented out first to an Anglican university chaplaincy, and now to the use of High-Church Anglicans as well as an Anglican evangelical mission.

In Liverpool their church was given Grade II listing protection in 1978, possibly when prayers services were still being held. By 1982 the church was up for sale, but without a buyer it succumbed to a fire in 1986.

The church lingered in ruins until the late 1990s when it was demolished and a nondescript block of flats erected on the site.

Elsewhere: Liverpool: Then and Now | Velvet Hummingbee

The ancient heresy of iconoclasm claimed a new victim this week: The statue of Theodore Roosevelt which graced the Manhattan memorial dedicated to him at the American Museum of Natural History has been removed at a cost of two million dollars.

The sculpture had attracted the ire of protestors who objected to the inclusion of a Native American and an African by the side of twenty-sixth President of the United States and sometime Governor of New York, which they claimed glorified colonialism and racism.

While the American Museum of Natural History is a private institution, it sits on land owned by the City, and the statue was paid for by the State.

The statue was doomed in June of last year when the New York City Public Design Commission voted unanimously to rip Teddy down.

As the New York Post put it, “He’s going on a rough ride!”

The statue was severed in two this week, with the top half removed and the bottom half following shortly after.

It will be shipped to the Badlands of North Dakota to be displayed as an object in a museum under construction there. (more…)

With 231 million Muslims, Indonesia today has the largest Islamic population of any country. The obligation of all Muslims who are capable to perform the Hajj — the annual pilgrimage to Mecca — at least once in their life meant that there was a continual flow of travel and traffic between the Arabian peninsula and the Dutch East Indies (as they once were).

The writer, photographer, and explorer Daniël van der Meulen was appointed the Dutch consul in Jeddah in 1923. Then followed three full years of intensive study of Arabic and Islam under the tutelage of the great Hollandic arabist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje before van der Meulen arrived in Arabia in 1926, just as the Sultan of Nejd, Ibn Saud, was securing his hold over the Hejaz.

The primary role of the Dutch consul at Jeddah was to look after the interests of the Netherlands-Indies pilgrims on the Hajj but, as that only took place once a year for several days, van der Meulen took full advantage of the down time to explore the Arabian peninsula.

Hadhramaut in Yemen was of particular interest to him and he completed several expeditions there between 1931 and 1944, forming strong friendships with many Hadhrami people along the way.

In 2003, the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT, or Royal Tropical Institute) in Amsterdam published Daniel van der Meulen in Arabia Felix: Travels and Photographs of a Dutch Diplomat in Yemen, 1931–1944 by Steven Vink, the photographic curator of the Tropical Museum.

It was published in cooperation with the Yemeni Embassy in the Hague and the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Sana’a. William Facey of the British-Yemeni Society gives it a strong review here, but hard copies are tricky to get hold of.

Not all European journeys to South Arabia have proved as fruitful as van der Meulen’s. Thorkild Hansen wrote a book about the Danish expedition of 1761 to 1767, a ‘spellbinding true story of a scientific expedition gone disastrously awry’.

This 1962 book has happily been brought back to life in a recent printing from the ever-estimable New York Review Books.

Photo: Source

Placenames can be tricky things in Transylvania. The city of Sighișoara in Romania is known as Segesvár to its Hungarian residents and Schäßburg in German — or even Schäsbrich in the dialect of the local Saxons.

Vlad Țepeș ‘the Impaler’ — who later entered legend as ‘Dracula’ — was probably born here in 1428 and the town survived the urbanistic depredations wreaked elsewhere by the tyrant Ceaușescu, perhaps more out of neglect than anything else.

The fortified middle of the town is still a real place inhabited by real people, centred around its clock tower begun in the thirteenth century and rebuilt in the seventeenth.

Photo: Johannes Hulsch

Instagram: @andcusack

Most Recent Posts

• Silver Jubilee November 21, 2024
• Articles of Note: 11 November 2024 November 11, 2024
• Why do you read? November 5, 2024
• India November 4, 2024
• The Lithe Efficiency of the Old Constitution November 4, 2024

Most Recent Comments

• Andrew Cusack on Articles of Note: 11 November 2024
• L G Clark on Articles of Note: 11 November 2024
• L Gaylord Clark on Why do you read?
• Frédéric on Why do you read?
• Herbert Raubenheimer on University Nicknames in South Africa
• Arthur Black on The Situation at St Andrews
• K. Dontoh on An Aldermanian Skyscraper
• L G Clark on Equality
• B T Van Nostrand on Rough Notes of Kinderhook
• Ned Hancock on The Spott Estate, Dunbar

Book Wishlist

Monthly Archives

Categories