tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45251849614550511862011-07-30T17:10:34.658+01:00Traditionally, a commonplace book was a journal in which an individual recorded his or her thoughts - or material from the work of others - which seemed relevant at the time. This is mine.Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.comBlogger181100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-42569267965648687132009-08-15T20:32:00.006+01:002009-08-15T20:39:07.733+01:00

This poem is by Julian Grenfell, who was killed in the Great War in 1915, shortly after writing it.Into BattleThe naked earth is warm with SpringAnd with green grass and bursting treesLeans to the Sun’s gaze gloryingAnd quivers in the sunny breeze;And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light,And striving evermore for these;And he is dead who will not fight;And who dies fighting has increase.The

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-29108042238418221712009-07-11T22:00:00.002+01:002009-07-11T22:03:22.413+01:00

This picture, entitled 'A Winter's Afternoon', a scene near Wotton in Surrey by the artist Waite, shows beautifully the transquillity and the cold and the light of the county of my birth. I feel homesick looking at it.

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-70971035801415282082009-05-27T21:14:00.006+01:002009-05-27T21:35:23.365+01:00

This is the German battleship Bismarck, which was sunk by the Royal Navy on 27 May 1941. The ship had a brief career - sent out on a sortie to attack Allied shipping in the Atlantic, it almost immediately sank the battlecruiser HMS Hood in the Battle of Denmark Strait - in this picture Bismarck is seen firing just afterwards, at Hood's companion ship HMS Prince of Wales. Bismarck was then hunted

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-71211721296240618292009-05-11T21:42:00.004+01:002009-07-11T22:05:02.066+01:00

This painting is Monastery Graveyard in Snow, by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. His subjects were often like this - images of abbeys, forests and so on against a romanticised landscape. In this picture, monks process through a graveyard to enter the ruins of their abbey. It is an apparently bleak vision but ultimately an uplifting one of faith and hope. The painting was

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-86054642279360243812009-05-10T21:45:00.003+01:002009-05-16T11:43:05.741+01:00

This is a NASA artist's impression of a red dwarf star. Our Sun's fate is to turn from a main sequence yellow star into a red dwarf, having first swollen considerably and destroying all life on Earth. When that happens, unless we have managed to quit this place for elsewhere, the words of a past prime Minister of Great Britain, Arthur Balfour, will come to pass:<!--[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-17931041708675987962009-05-09T21:32:00.004+01:002009-05-09T21:43:48.647+01:00

This painting is by Annie Ovenden and is entitled Storm Gathering Over St German's. Ms Ovenden and her husband were members of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, a distinctly English group of painters who depicted nature in a very special way - not naturalistic but with a very keen eye for the feel of a place. Although no longer in formal existence, the group still has a website here. There is also a

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-73252458051618441642009-05-09T21:29:00.004+01:002009-05-16T11:40:05.540+01:00

This painting by Emerson shows the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) reclining with friends outside the Northumberland house of Cragside, in 1884. This house was the first in the world to be lit using hydroelectricity.

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-64161417336671239972009-05-08T22:33:00.004+01:002009-05-21T22:39:27.591+01:00

Depending on which account you read, the relationship between the Anglo-Irish playwright Oscar Wilde and his friend Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas (above) seems either quite unpleasant or a thing of poetic beauty. It put Wilde into prison in 1895, where he wrote a long letter of recrimination ('De Profundis'). Their contact afterwards was sporadic, although Douglas was chief mourner at Wilde's

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-60835252846896599652009-05-04T14:49:00.006+01:002009-05-04T15:09:28.135+01:00

This picture taken in the 1930s shows two of the famous (or notorious, depending on your point of view) Mitford sisters, posing with a group of quite amiable-looking SS officers. On the left (notwithstanding the filename of the photo)is Unity, who had spent some considerable time in Munich hanging around Adolf Hitler during his rise to power. Shortly after the outbreak of war in September 1939,

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-43979605724501551552009-05-02T00:12:00.005+01:002009-05-02T00:20:35.963+01:00

I have recently been reading Evelyn Waugh's book 'Brideshead Revisted' following seeing again the 1981 TV series. In the opening chapters, Oxford is referred to by the narrator Charles Ryder (who is an artist) as still being a 'city of aquatint'. I realised I had no idea what an aquatint is: in fact it is a particular kind of print, produced by a process I have not fully understood. But I see

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-79951602033696494942009-04-29T21:21:00.008+01:002009-05-02T00:04:34.467+01:00

These images are paintings by the artist Margaret Dovaston. Ignored by the art establishment, they have graced countless waiting rooms and living rooms, although their popularity is now quite diminished. I once bought a print of the second picture at a car boot sale but I somehow lost it at work. They are redolent of an earlier age; most take place in a country inn, or some in a squire's house.

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-83526859239635520352009-04-28T22:22:00.004+01:002009-04-28T22:32:03.937+01:00

'Marriage of Convenience' by Orchardson'Garden of Eden' by Riviere These two paintings show a great deal about relationships. In the first, a beautiful young wife sits listless at the dinner table, bored with her much older husband in a wealthy Victorian household. In the second, painted around 1900 and much more 'modern' in style, a young couple walk in a London park. Her face is eager and she

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-75525883382603958642009-04-27T23:08:00.005+01:002009-05-09T21:56:26.669+01:00

So said the Soviet leader Josef Stalin, in an oft-misunderstood quotation. His own death came in March 1953 and here his acolytes carry his coffin. The two front figures are (left) Malenkov, and (right) Beria, the notorious head of the secret police, who only a few months later was despatched by his colleagues. Other figures in the picture are the veteran foreign minister Molotov (black hat,

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-81621673188870847872009-04-26T21:33:00.006+01:002009-04-26T22:02:12.110+01:00

This is Galaxy M104, sometimes know as the Sombrero Galaxy. It is approximately 29 million light years from Earth (just under 290 million million million kilometres), so what we see today was the galaxy as it was 29 million years ago. No doubt a lot has happened there since then; it certainly has here. What's it like there now?This picture of somewhere almost unthinkably remote from our own lives

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-16854677478078660452009-04-24T20:55:00.004+01:002009-04-27T23:25:20.113+01:00

This painting by the Italian war illustrator Matania depicts 'A' Company of the 2nd Battlion Royal Munster Fusiliers, stopped en route to Aubers Ridge in Belgium on 8 May 1915. The central figure is Father Francis Gleeson, a Roman Catholic priest, who is pronouncing a general absolution on the soldiers before they go into battle. The next day, 19 out of 22 officers and 320 'other ranks' out of

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-87034069997391570302009-04-23T20:18:00.016+01:002009-04-23T22:13:46.173+01:00

I saw this striking picture for the first time in the recent BBC-TV programme 'The Victorians', fronted by Jeremy Paxman. But nothing was said to identify the painting; and even more frustratingly it did not appear in the 'book of the series'. Other enquiries led to nothing. Finding out on the internet what a particular image is remains hard, despite the introduction of Google's 'similar pictures

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-56833294523575672252009-04-21T22:34:00.007+01:002009-05-02T00:10:33.161+01:00

This postcard, which I bought a few years ago, was sent in 1897 by Muriel Hill, ending her singing lessons. Miss Hill can be tracked down even now, in the 1901 census records; at that time she was in her mid-twenties, living at home with her family still, in the prosperous suburb of Harrow . The postcard has survived because of the stamp it carries, although that is ordinary enough. But one

Ponsonbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14564428865951776834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4525184961455051186.post-62587297123221561082009-04-20T23:06:00.005+01:002009-04-20T23:19:02.281+01:00

Today I sat in Bristol Cathedral for an hour before an appointment. This was a rare opportunity to do nothing but think and watch, without interruption. I watched an Italian-looking girl genuflecting twice before the altar, a Catholic practice in an Anglican cathedral. And I saw two of the cathedral workers tidying the huge paschal candle, which is lit for Easter. These candles are very

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