First Impressions: Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the V&A

by Charlotte Crow,

After seven years in development, the £31.75 million new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum open to the public this Wednesday. A full fanfare deserves to be sounded.

At the press view this morning there was still protective polythene in evidence, altar pieces were being vacuumed and capitals lowered into place atop pillars. But these finishing touches did not detract from the visual and spatial impact of the ten galleries which span 300 AD to 1600. On display are some of the most beautiful works of European art and craftsmanship of the period and although aesthetically the objects speak for themselves, their appreciation is unquestionably enhanced by this creative overhaul.

The architects in charge of the reconfiguration of the original 1909 galleries, MUMA (McInnes Usher McKnight Architects), have also been responsible for the design and this, together with a close curatorial input, helps to explain the successful cohesion of the project. Large-scale architectural pieces, many of which have not been seen for decades or more, are integrated within the gallery scheme; one can take a view from an Italian stone balcony, walk through a vast marble choir screen from the Netherlands and examine from all angles a three-storey wooden spiral staircase from Morlaix in Brittany dating from the 1520s.

The overwhelming impression is of light and breathing space for objects large and small. The design is confident and contemporary without being self conscious or intrusive. I especially liked the onyx window screens in the lower galleries, inspired by medieval alabaster, which delicately filter natural light behind the brilliant stained glass, and the artefact labels of beaten ‘gold-leaf’.

The galleries, which have been funded by £20 million of private donations and a £9.75 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, are arranged broadly chronologically but also thematically, enabling the exhibits to shine a broader light on the times and allowing artefacts from different places to sit alongside each other. The famous enamel Becket Casket, made within twenty years of Becket’s murder in Limoges and believed to have held his relics, is displayed close to a 12th-century church-shaped metalwork and ivory tabernacle from Cologne in the section ‘Faiths and Empires 300-1250’. In ‘Devotion and Display 1300-1500’ religious celebration is explored through works of art commissioned by civic groups as well as by individuals. Here stained glass window panels commissioned by Bishop William of Wykeham for Winchester College c.1393, are shown alongside fragments of Giovanni Pisano’s late 13th-century sculpture of the prophet Haggai, which once graced the façade of Siena cathedral.

There is too much to see in one visit, but this is somewhere I will look forward to returning to linger over the treasures and dig deeper into the layers of interpretation on offer.

Images:

- detail of the Troy tapestry

- the Becket casket

17th-century account of one of the first ever blood transfusions

Account of one of the first blood transfusions between two dogs
To celebrate its 350th anniversary, the Royal Society launched ‘Trailblazing’, today, a new interactive timeline which provides unprecedented online access to original manuscripts published by the Royal Society over the past 350 years. The website features 60 articles selected from an archive of more than 60,000 published by the Royal Society between 1665 and 2010. Read the press release.
In Prince Rupert and the Surgeons Graham Martin reconstructs the details of Prince Rupert's successful brain operation in 1667 and argues that the methods used by the surgeons of the time were vindicated.
For further information on the history of science, visit our History of Science focus page.

Things French kings never said
Marie-Antoinette never said ‘let them eat cake’. This misattributed quotation is just one amongst many that are listed in Petit Inventaire des Citations Malmenées, recently published by Albin Michel. Charles Bremner comments on his Paris blog.

Obituary of Jean-Francois Bergier
The Swiss historian is notably remembered for his study of Switzerland’s wartime past and relationship with Nazi Germany. His obituary is published in The Times.

Save the ‘Icons of England’
Some 4,000 village pubs have disappeared since 1980 according to the British Beer and Pub Association (BPBA). The American author Bill Bryson was appointed president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) in 2007. Following a recent survey, he launched a new appeal to save some of England’s icons, such as post boxes and post offices, village pubs and independent local shops. Stephen Adams reports in The Telegraph.

Advent Favourites: Countdown to Christmas with the Best History Moments of 2009

Over the course of December we will be updating the blog every day with a selection of the best history moments of the past year, including films, plays, books, exhibitions, websites, History Today articles and news stories.

On Tuesday, December 1st, we will kick-start the countdown with the nominations of the History Today team.

Throughout the month, we will also feature our readers’ favourite history moments, as well as selections from some of our top contributors.

What were your best history moments of 2009?

To send in your nominations, email k.hadley[at]historytoday.com. Simply name your favourite historically-themed film, play, book, exhibition, website, news story or History Today article with just one sentence explaining your choice.

At the end of the month, we will send ten lucky participants a selection of our favourite 2009 books to thank you for your contributions!

What became of Sir John Narbrough’s diary?

by Kathryn Hadley

Sir John Narbrough was the first British sailor to navigate round the Straits of Magellan. He kept a journal documenting his two-year journey to Patagonia and the Caribbean from 1669 to 1670. His diary was, however, lost for the past 300 years and Narbrough’s achievements were largely forgotten.

When his journal was discovered earlier this year, it became the subject of a fierce battle between a foreign collector who purchased it for £310,000 and the British Library to secure it for the nation. A temporary export bar was imposed by culture minister Barbara Follett to give the British Library time to secure the necessary funds to purchase the diary. The temporary export bar was, however, due to expire on November 7th. What happened to the diary?

At the beginning of the week, I contacted Pamela Stephenson, the Head of Individuals and Major Donors at the British Library, to find out…

The news was positive. The British Library has successfully completed the fundraising campaign and secured the necessary funds to purchase the diary. The acquisition process is now due to begin.

The 'law for the prevention of genetic ill procreation' and compulsory sterilisation in Nazi Germany: the law still exists

The forgotten victims of the Nazi programme of sterilisation of ‘genetically ill’ people
The ‘law for the prevention of genetic ill procreation’ was introduced by the Nazi regime in 1934. It is estimated about 400,000 people suffered compulsory sterilisation. But the exact figures are difficult to ascertain because many did not survive the ordeal. Although the German Parliament suspended the law in 2007, it did not eliminate it.
Anna Catherin Loll provides a vivid and harrowing account in The Times.

Darwinism doubted and British creationists
Darwinism is often associated with atheism in the US and Britain. But a conference last week in Alexandria, Egypt, revealed that anti-evolution views are also widespread in the Muslim world. Reuters reports.
For the first time, the think tank Thesos has carried out a scientific study on British creationist reasoning. Andrew Brown comments on the results of the survey in The Guardian.

Captain Scott tweets
As of today, 99 years on from the date of the original entry on November 26th 1910, the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute will blog and tweet the daily journal entries made by Captain Scott during his final expedition. The diary charts his Terra Nova expedition from November 1910 when the expedition left New Zealand, through the scientific missions of 1911 and the journey to the South Pole, until the very final entry probably written on March 29th, 1912.

19th-century vows of love
Following the introduction of Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1753, which required that anyone under the age of 21 had to have the consent of guardians or parents to get married, many young couples fled to Scotland where the minimum age had remained 16. Gretna Green was the first stopping point across the border on the London to Edinburgh stagecoach route.
The website ancestry.co.uk has recently made the Gretna Green marriage registers from 1795-1895 available online, as part of its Ancestry World Archives Project.

Restoration of a 2,500-year-old Greek theatre under the Acropolis
The Theatre of Dionysus is due to undergo a six-year restoration program. The Guardian reports on the plans recently announced by Greek officials.

The magician who worked for the CIA during the Cold War
John Mulholland was employed by the CIA to write a report on the arts of concealment and secret communication during the Cold War. The only known surviving copy of his work has recently been turned into a book entitled The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception and published earlier this month by William Morrow & Company.
Alex Spillius reports in The Telegraph.

95-year-old German high jumper honoured

95-year-old German high jumper honoured
On June 30th, 1936, the German high jumper Gretel Bergmann matched a German high jump record of 5ft 3in (1.60 metres). Two weeks later, however, her feat was erased from the record books and she was banned from the 1936 Berlin Olympics by the Nazis because she was Jewish. She emigrated to the US and changed her name to Margaret Lambert.
Yesterday, however, Germany’s track and field association restored her record. It has also requested that she be added to Germany’s sports hall of fame.
The Guardian reports.

The sale of Hitler’s limousine: the buyer is not Russian but a Cypriot
Dave Graham from Reuters reports on an interview with the German car dealer, Michael Fröhlich, who traced the vehicle.

Paul Delaroche’s painting of Charles I Insulted by Cromwell’s Soldiers, which was damaged by a German bomb during the Second World War, is due to go on display at National Gallery in February. In June, it was unrolled for the first time in 68 years. Ben Hoyle reports in The Times.

The Queen in Bermuda to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the island’s settlement by the British
Read the article on the Mail Online.

How the astronomical alignment of Greek temples reflects cultural and ethnic identities

by Kathryn Hadley

Historians and archaeologists have long sought to establish links between the positions of classical temples and cultural and religious practices. Many have speculated that classical temples may have been aligned with respect to sunrise and argued that temples could be dated from their astronomical alignment. There is no consensus, however.

Dr Alun Salt, from the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester, explained the controversy:

‘There are quite a few temples in Greece which don't face sunrise. So a few
archaeologists have suggested that there is nothing significant about the number
that face east. The problem is that no one has ever said what a 'significant
number' would be.’

Salt has recently conducted a survey of archaic and classical Greek temples in Sicily and Greece. Through a comparison of the alignment patterns of temples in the two countries, he sought to determine the extent to which Greek culture differed in Sicily and Greece. His study was published last week, on November 19th, on the website PLoS ONE in the article ‘The Astronomical Orientation of Ancient Greek Temples’.

Do the alignments of Ancient Greek temples in Sicily and Greece reflect astronomical intentions? How do they reveal different pressures in the expressions of ethnic identity? How far are they evidence of a degree of cultural continuity across the Mediterranean?

Applying mathematical principles of probability to his survey, Salt discovered that many classical temples in Sicily were built to face the rising sun. Indeed, of a total of 41 temples surveyed in Sicily, only one faced west. He explained how in Greece, however, the situation is ‘quite complicated’.

‘It would be like spinning a roulette wheel and finding that half the time the
ball bounces out of the wheel. But when it does land, 90% of the time it'll be
on red. That looks odd to me.’

According to Dr Salt, the results may imply that there is an ‘astronomical fingerprint’ for Greek settlers in the Mediterranean. If all the temples founded by Greek settlers were built following similar alignment patters this may help to distinguish between the sites settled by people following the Greek religion and natives who adopted Greek style through trade, but kept their own culture.

There remain a number of unanswered questions, however. Salt explained:

‘What’s really interesting are the temples which don't fit. The temple of
Hekate, a lunar goddess, at Selinous faces west. If every other temple in Sicily
faces east, then what is special about that one?’

In Greek Archaeology from Schliemann to Surveys Graham Shipley considers how new archaeological discoveries and techniques are progressively refining our views of Classical Greece.

Update on the Staffordshire Hoard

by Kathryn Hadley

Yesterday, Paul Lay commented on the release of a small illustrated book on the Staffordshire Hoard written by Kevin Leahy and Roger Bland. The book is due to be published by the British Museum Press next week, on November 30th.

The British Museum is also hosting a series of lectures about the Staffordshire Hoard.
On Thursday November 26th, Dr Kevin Leahy, National Adviser for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, will give his first impressions of cataloguing the Staffordshire find.
On December 10th, co-author of the book and Head of Portable Antiquities and Treasure at the British Museum, Roger Bland, will tell the story of how the hoard was found, the work that has been carried out on the hoard so far, and what will happen to it next.

The missing pages of Darwin's notebooks

Turning the pages of Darwin’s notebooks
To mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, today, November 24th, English Heritage have digitised and published online Charles Darwin’s notebooks which he wrote during his five-year voyage on board HMS Beagle. The notebooks contain nearly 116,000 words and 300 sketches and doodles and provide a fascinating insight into his day-to-day experiences and thoughts. The online archive also features highlights from a 1969 microfilm of Darwin’s Galapagos notebook.

The missing notebook
All that remains of the Galapagos notebook, however, are the extracts on the 1969 microfilm. The notebook has been missing from Darwin’s former home in Kent, Down House, since the early 1980s. English Heritage bought the house in 1996 and today launched an appeal for help to trace the Galapagos notebook.
The appeal is notably supported by Darwin's great-great grandson, Randal Keynes OBE. He described how:

‘[his] family always felt that the best Darwin material should be at Down House
so that the public could see it in his home. The Galapagos notebook is of
outstanding value for the history of science. If Darwin had not posed the
questions in that notebook, he might never have written On the Origin of
Species. The notebook was almost certainly stolen around the 1980s. But I am
hopeful that it is only a matter of time before it resurfaces and when it does,
it must be returned to English Heritage and Down House.’

Read the press release on the website of English Heritage.
In The Descent of Genius: Charles Darwin's Brilliant Career Roy Porter considers the origins of Charles Darwin’s particular species of genius.

A Russian investor’s hunt for Hitler’s limousine
Spiegel Online interviewed the German classic car dealer, Michael Fröhlich, who traced the vehicle. The armoured limousine is a bluish-black Mercedes 770A Kompressor, which is estimated to sell for up to €10 million euros. The car’s original log book states that the car was delivered to the ‘Führer and Reich Chancellor’ in 1935. The Russian buyer is also purchasing five other vehicles of the same model, four of which were owned by Nazi officials including von Ribbentrop.

Galileo's fingers and tooth rediscovered

Rediscovery of Galileo’s missing fingers and tooth
In 1737, two fingers and a tooth were allegedly removed from Galileo Galilei’s corpse by some of the astronomer’s fans whilst his body was being moved to Santa Croce basilica in Florence. They have recently been rediscovered and are due to go on display in the Museum of the History of Science in Florence next spring. Read the reports on the websites of The Telegraph, The Scotsman and the MailOnline.
Galileo designed a telescope which enabled him to observe the planets, but who first invented the telescope? Accoridng to Nick Pelling in Who Invented the Telescope? the credit should go not to the Netherlands but much further south to Catalonia.

John Lewis and the memory of Ireland’s Easter 1916 Rising
Plans to redevelop the area around Moore Street and the General Post Office in central Dublin have sparked protests by heritage campaigners in an attempt to preserve 16 Moore Street where the rebellion’s leaders eventually surrendered to the British army. Henry McDonald reports in The Observer.
In Cesca: A Young Nationalist in the Easter Rising Anthony Fletcher examines his great-aunt, Cesca Chenevix Trench’s, eyewitness account of the Easter Rising.
In 2003, witness statements from the men and women who took part in the uprising were made available to the public after decades in a government vault. Charles Townshend shares some of the accounts that he read in 'Soldiers Are We': Women in the Irish Rising.

Launch of online archive of Second World War aerial photographs
The Aerial Reconnaissance Archives (TARA) contain more than 10 million declassified documents including aerial photographs taken by secret RAF reconnaissance flights during the Second World War. A new online archive of some of the images was launched today, revealing wartime images of prison camps and air raids to the public for the first time.
The archive can be viewed on the website of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS). For further information, read the press release on the RCAHMS website and the article published in The Scotsman.
A slideshow of some of the photographs is also available on the BBC website.

How much is the Staffordshire hoard really worth?
The government’s treasure valuation committee is due to meet with individual experts this Wednesday, November 25th, to evaluate the treasure. Following further excavation work, another 300 more individual items were unearthed.
Richard Brooks reports in The Times.

Discovery of Churchill’s cigar, which he smoked as he planned D-Day
Ronald Williams, who served as Churchill’s butler at the Casablanca conference in 1943, gave the cigar to his grandson Christian Williams when he was a child over ten years ago. The cigar has now been valued at £800.
Read the report on the website of The Telegraph.
At the Casablanca conference the British persuaded the Americans to postpone a cross-Channel invasion. But could D-Day have happened earlier? John Grigg reports in The Liberation of Europe: A Bridgehead Too Late?

The fight to subdue the Scots and for children's rights

20th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child
The Convention on the Rights of the Child was signed in 1989 and has since been ratified by 193 countries. Only the United States and Somalia have yet to adhere to the convention.
The Convention was the first legally binding international convention to affirm human rights for all children. It spells out the basic human rights that children have everywhere in the world in 54 articles and 2 optional protocols including the right to survival, to develop to the fullest, to protection from harmful influences, abuse and exploitation, and to participate fully in family, cultural and social life. The Convention adheres to four core principles: non-discrimination, devotion to the best interests of the child, the right to life, survival and development, and respect for the views of the child.
An official commemorative ceremony will be held in New York today to mark the event.
In an article of the website of UNICEF Dan Seymour, Chief of the Gender and Rights Unit of UNICEF’s Policy and Practice Division, assesses the achievements of the Convention and the remaining challenges.
In Paris, a photographic exhibition entitled ‘Sale gosse!’ is on display at the headquarters of UNESCO (Salle Miro, 7 Place de Fontenoy) until December 10th. A slideshow of some of the photographs is available on the website of Le Figaro.

More Roman military camps in Scotland than in any other European country
There exist at least 225 Roman military camps in Scotland against an estimated 150 in England. The Scotsman reports on the announcement of a new comprehensive survey of Roman remains in Scotland to be carried out by archaeologists from Historic Scotland. It is believed that the survey will uncover previously undiscovered Roman sites boosting the total of officially recognised sites and giving them increased legal protection.

Restoration of Crux Vaticana
The Crux Vaticana was unveiled by the Vatican, yesterday, after a two-year restoration project. The jewel encrusted golden cross is a foot-high and contains what is revered as fragments of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. It was given to the people of Rome sometime between 565 and 578 by the Byzantine emperor Justin II. Nicole Winfield reports on the website of The Scotsman.

Photo:
By Francois Perri, from the exhibition 'sale gosse' held at UNESCO in Paris

L'affaire suisse: how US intelligence bought the French resistance

L’affaire Suisse: how the US intelligence service bought the French resistance
On the website of The Times Matthew Cobb reviews Robert Belot and Gilbert Karpman’s latest account of ‘l’affaire Suisse’. The financial scandal involved the resistance movement Combat led by Henry Frenay, which accepted millions of dollars from the US Office of Strategic Services in return for intelligence about the situation in occupied France. The money was channelled through Switzerland.
In The Resistance in France Roderick Kedward examines the activities and success of the Resistance movement in France from 1940 to 1944.

Wine drinking under Napoleon: Josephine’s expensive tastes in wine
The Telegraph reports on a new exhibition devoted to the Empress Josephine’s wine cellar, which opened yesterday at her former residence outside Paris at the château de Malmaison. The inventory of her wine cellar, handwritten in 1814, lists over 13,000 bottles including some of the finest wines and many grands crus from all over the world.

The sale of Cromwell’s boots
A pair of leather boots, which allegedly belonged to Oliver Cromwell, is due to be sold by Dreweatts auctioneers next Thursday, November 26th. The boots are expected to fetch up to £500. They are part of the collection of John Fane, a descendant of the 8th Earl of Westmorland, who fell into possession of the boots when he inherited Wormsley Park. There is no proof that the boots belonged to Cromwell, but a previous owner of the house, Colonel Adrian Scrope, was a member of the Parliamentarian Army during the Civil War and was a signatory on the death warrant to Charles I.
Read the article on The Times.

Timid historians of Wales and heart disease in ancient Egypt

Explaining the timidity of Wales’ historians
Hywel Williams explains why the study of Welsh history need not be as boring as it may seem on the website of The Guardian.

The Holodomor or ‘death by hunger’: the forgotten famine
Modern Russia has still not officially recognised the Holodomor. Gareth Jones was one of two journalists who travelled to the Ukraine and reported back to the West on the suffering which he witnessed first hand. Will the current focus on Jones (his diaries are on display in Cambridge and a documentary was recently released about him last week) bring the narrative away from the political disputes in which it is bound-up? James Marson reports in The Guardian.

Heart Disease in Ancient Egypt
Factors causing heart disease may not just be a by-product of modern times and lifestyles according to the latest research by scientists from the University of California, the Mid America Heart Institute, Wisconsin Heart Hospital and Al Azhar Medical School in Cairo.
The results of the study were published in the November 18th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Read the press release on the website of the University of California.

The only surviving letter written by Lincoln to a child
A letter written by Lincoln to an 8-year-old schoolboy and sent just two week’s after his March 1861 inauguration is being put on sale in Philadelphia for £36,000 by the Raab Collection. When George Patten told his classmates that he had met the president with his father who was a journalist, they mocked him. Lincoln wrote that he ‘did see and talk with master George Evans Patten’.
Read the article in The Times.

India’s Joan of Arc
Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, was one of India’s most famous female rebels against British colonial rule. A letter written in her hand, shortly before the Indian Mutiny of 1857, to the governor general of the East India Company, Lord Dalhousie, has recently been discovered in the archives of the British Library. The letter is part of the Bowring Collection named after the British civil servant Lewin Bentham Bowring, who was working in India at the time and gathered an extensive collection of documents relating to the maharajas. Read the article on the website of the BBC.
In Indian Voices from the 1857 Rebellion Joseph Coohill uncovers some Indian accounts of the Indian Mutiny. In 400 years of the East India Company Huw V. Bowen explores the history of the East India Company and asks whether it was one of the ‘most powerful engines’ of state and empire in British history.

Secret Mussolini
Secret Mussolini is published today in Italy by Rizzoli. The new book is based on the diaries of Mussolini’s lover, Claretta Petacci, written between 1932 and 1938. Extracts from the diaries were published on Monday by the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera. Read Alessandra Rizzo’s article from the Associated Press.

Preserving public access to over 4,500 boxes of papers relating to Lord Palmerston and Mountbatten: the Broadlands Archives campaign

by Kathryn Hadley

At the end of last week, the University of Southampton launched a campaign to raise the necessary funds to preserve public access in the UK to hundreds of thousands of papers and photographs relating to Lord Mountbatten and Lord Palmerston. The Broadlands Archives have been on loan to the University’s Hartley Library since 1989, where they were transferred from the home of Lord Romsey. They were inherited by Lord Romsey, Mountbatten's grandson, on Mountbatten's assassination by the IRA off the Irish coast on August 27th, 1979. The University now needs to raise 2.85 million to acquire the Broadlands Archives.

The archives are stored in more than 4,500 boxes and include documents which chart the major political, social, diplomatic and economic events of the 19th and 20th centuries. They include 1,200 letters dealing with foreign affairs and general government business from the Queen to Lord Palmerston (1784-1865), who served as Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary and Prime Minister during Queen Victoria’s reign.

There are also 250,000 papers and 50,000 photographs which chart the career of Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1900-1979). In particular, they cover his time as Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia Command (SACSEA) from 1943 to 1946, and as the last Viceroy of India in 1947 and 1948 and the first Governor-General of the newly independent Union of India. Correspondence from this time includes letters from Gandhi and there are also papers and photographs of Mountbatten’s wife Edwina, Countess Mountbatten.

Lastly, the Broadlands Archives include the diaries of the politician and philanthropist Anthony Ashley Cooper (1801-1885), the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. Known as the ‘poor man’s earl’, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury notably fought for the protection of child chimney sweeps and shorter working hours for children and women in factories, and his papers provide an insight into social progress in Victorian England.

In Safe Harbour for Mountbatten Archive Sydney Reynolds reports on the initial transfer of the Broadlands Archives to the Hartley Library in April 1989.

In 1991 we republished a vintage article by AJP Taylor entitled Lord Palmerston and written in July 1951 about the 60 year long career of Lord Palmerston.
Also, for further information on the Indian partition and the role of Lord Mountbatten as the last Viceroy of India, read our article Mountbatten and the Transfer of Power.

Image:
Lord and Lady Mounbatten with Gandhi on the terrace of the Viceroy's House in New Delhi, 1947 (courtesy of The Trustees of the Broadlands Archives)

Napoleon’s hair on display in London

by Kathryn Hadley

Last Thursday, Sir John Soane’s Museum in London announced that a gold mourning-ring belonging to Soane and containing a lock of Napoleon’s hair had been returned to the museum. The museum had previously tried to acquire the ring at an auction held by Christie’s in June. At the time, however, the museum was the under-bidder. With the support of The Art Fund and private donors the museum has now successfully purchased the ring for £41,000.

The ring originally belonged to Sir John Soane and was allegedly one of his most treasured private possessions. It featured on his will among the items to be kept ‘as heir looms in my family’. However, it eventually passed out of the family’s ownership and was deemed lost. When it went on sale in June, it was the first time that the museum had news of its whereabouts since Soane’s death in 1837.

The ring is hallmarked London 1822, the year after Napoleon’s death. It contains a lock of plaited brown hair, which was given to Sir John by Elizabeth Balcombe, the daughter of an official on St Helena who became close friends with the Emperor. Sir John Soane’s Museum Archive contains a brief letter of presentation from Elizabeth Balcombe which reads:

‘Knowing how much Mr Soane esteems the reliques of great men Miss E. Balcombe
presents him with a lock of Bonaparte’s hair received by her from the hands of
that great Personage.’

A French inscription on the inside reads in English: ‘This lock of hair of Napoleon Buonaparte was presented to John Soane Esquire by Miss Elizabeth Balcombe.’ It also includes the words Prier Pour Moi (pray for me).

It is believed that Sir John Soane commissioned the ring to contain this ‘relique’ and chose the inscription himself. Soane was fascinated by Napoleon. On the south wall of the Breakfast Room in the museum there are notably two portraits of the Emperor, one as a young soldier and the other on the eve of his downfall. In the words of Tim Knox, Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum:

‘Soane had a horrible fascination with Napoleon and this ring, with its plait of
the vanquished Emperor’s hair, was the ultimate trophy. We are thrilled to get
it back to its old home.’

The ring is due to go in display in the museum at the end of November.

Read the press release on the website of The Art Fund.
For further reading on Napoleon, visit our Napoleonic Era focus page.

The Online Encyclopaedia of Mass Violence: calming the dead who still haunt the present

by Kathryn Hadley

What is genocide? What is mass violence? How do historians document genocide and mass violence?
Professor Jacques Sémelin, research director at the Centre for International Studies and Research (CERI), is an expert on genocide based at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris (Sciences Po). He spoke on Thursday, November 12th, at the University of Manchester about his latest project to produce an online record of 20th century acts of mass violence. Dr Jean Marc Dreyfus from the University of Manchester is a member of the project’s steering committee responsible for its implementation and development. Sémelin initiated the project in 2004 and the website was launched four years later. I interviewed Professor Sémelin yesterday.

The origins of the project
Sémelin is the author of Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide and his project to create an electronic database documenting the massacres and genocides of the 20th century came with his book. The book uses a multidisciplinary approach (Sémelin himself began his career as a psychologist and then moved on to study history and sociology) to analyse and compare the mass massacres during the Holocaust, in Rwanda and in Bosnia. With the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence he sought to expand his study to other examples of mass massacre using the same of comparative analysis.

The main aims of the website
The website features articles about acts of violence in the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Rwanda, for example, as well as lesser known cases in Kampuchea, Poland and Tasmania. The purpose of the website is to create a reliable and universal public service accessible to everyone, in countries across the world. It is designed to provide a balanced study of 20th-century massacres in the hope that it will enhance our understanding of such conflicts and the ‘destructive passions’ of men. All contributions are subject to a rigorous selection process. Contributors are given strict guidelines and each contribution is then peer-reviewed. Sémelin also stressed the importance of a multidisciplinary approach due to the complexity of phenomena of mass violence and the site includes articles by historians, as well as demographers, sociologists, anthropologists and NGO staff.

But what qualifies as an act of genocide? How do we define mass murder? How do Sémelin and his team select the cases that are documented on the website?
The section entitled ‘our scientific approach’ on the homepage of the website addresses some of the issues surrounding the definitions of genocide and mass murder.
Defining phenomena of mass violence or genocide is inherently complex in part because notions and perceptions of violence are subject to cultural sensitivities. Definitions of violence change over time and in accordance with the culture of a particular country or region.

‘Genocide’ is also a complex and controversial term. Coined in 1944 by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin, it was then applied to international law in the Convention for the Prevention and Repression of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the United Nations on December 9th, 1948. In the aftermath of the Second World War, it was primarily used to refer to the crimes of the Holocaust. Its use then spread over the course of the 20th century to refer to the most horrific of crimes committed against civilian populations. It was even used retroactively to refer to crimes, such as the Armenian genocide in 1915, committed before the term was invented.

The term ‘mass violence’, rather than ‘genocide’, was deliberately chosen because it is more neutral and general, an ‘umbrella notion’. It refers to ‘human phenomena of collective destructiveness that are primarily due to political, social, religious or cultural causes’, committed against non-combatant populations. It excludes cases of technological accidents and natural disasters. References to ‘mass’, ‘mass killing, ‘mass murder’ or ‘mass rape’, is furthermore a 20th-century invention, which reflects the aim of the encyclopedia to document 20th-century cases of violence.

But how then does one define a ‘mass’ phenomenon’? Where does one draw the line?
Another inherent problem to the definition of ‘mass violence’ is that it is, in many cases, very difficult to evaluate precisely numbers of victims. Sémelin stated 50 as the minimum number of victims for a case to qualify as ‘mass violence’.

Documenting mass violence is inevitably bound-up in a web of subjective and conflicting memories. What effects have issues of memory had on the project to construct a neutral and balanced website documenting all sides of the conflict?
Issues of memory are at the core of the project not least because, in Sémelin’s words, ‘memory is always in the present’. Memory is particularly an issue when dealing with relatively recent conflicts, such as the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s or the violence in Darfur. In Algeria the conflict of 20 years ago is still taboo; in Darfur it remains impossible to access the area or any documents on the conflict. Sémelin quoted William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun to summarise the everlastingness of memory: 'The past is never dead. It’s not even past’.

One of his key aims is to examine ‘how we speak of the dead in the present’. In his view, historians speak of the dead in different ways: some view themselves as judges of the past and seek to redress the injustices of the past by writing a version of history which avenges the dead; others, Sémelin included, view themselves as ‘pacifying’ historians with no particular allegiance and whose role it is to facilitate the work of memory by considering each party’s memory of events. The role of history and of the project is to ‘calm the dead who still haunt the present, and to offer them scriptural tombs’ (Michel de Certau, The Writing of History).

Sémelin's project is a massive one, which is hugely complex and never-ending. But it is also fascinating, of undeniable necessity and of great interest to follow.

For further information visit the website http://www.massviolence.org/

Ned Kelly and Gareth Jones brought back to life

Discovery of skull of Australian bandit Ned Kelly
Ned Kelly was hanged in Melbourne Pentridge Prison, aged 25, on November 11th 1880. However, what happened to his body has remained a mystery ever since. What was allegedly his skull was displayed in Melbourne Goal until 1978, when it was stolen.
But, at the beginning of the week an Australian farmer, Tom Baxter, handed a skull over to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine claiming that it belonged to Ned Kelly. He said that he had been in possession of the skull for years, but did not explain how he first came across it.
The skull is currently being analysed in order to determine if it does belong to the famous bandit. The identification tests are expected to last a year.
Read the reports on the Mail Online and the website of The Times.

Gareth Jones brought back to life
Gareth Jones’ diaries, which he wrote in the Ukraine in 1932-33, went on display for the first time, today, in the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a student. In 1932-33, Jones travelled to the Soviet Ukraine to report on the famine known as the Holodomar. He was the first journalist to reveal the horrors of the famine to the western world. According to modern estimates, 4 million people died in the famine, which is now formally recognised as an act of genocide in the Ukraine. Two years after the publication of his articles, Jones was killed, aged 29, by Chinese bandits in Mongolia. Gareth Jones is regarded as a hero in the Ukraine and last year he was awarded the order of freedom, the highest order that the Ukraine gives to non-citizens, for his reporting.
The exhibition coincides with the première of Serhii Bukovs’kyi’s documentary The Living, this evening, as part of the Second Annual Cambridge Festival of Ukrainian Film.
The exhibition will run until mid-December. Read the press release on the website of the University of Cambridge.
There is also a website devoted to Gareth Jones.
http://www.garethjones.org/

Mining company under investigation for destroying part of Great Wall of China
It was announced on Wednesday that the Chinese gold mining company Hohhot Kekao Mining Co. is being investigated for damaging one of the oldest sections of the Great Wall in Inner Mongolia, which dates from the Qin dynasty (221-206 BC). According to Wang Dafang, the head of the regional cultural relics bureau, company officials could face up to 10 years in prison if they are found guilty. Read the report by the Associated Press on CBS News.

New website devoted to Robert Louis Stevenson
The New Scotsman reports on a new website dedicated to the life and works of Robert Louis Stevenson, launched yesterday at Edinburgh Napier University.
The website includes pages devoted to each of Stevenson’s texts with information about their publication and reception, a biography of the author, as well as information on his family, friends and literary network, and a photograph gallery with images from the photograph albums that the Stevenson family kept in Samoa, many of which have never been seen by the public before.
http://www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/

Sniffing Books: What the smell of books says about their state of decay

by Kathryn Hadley

The smell of old books and historic documents can explain a lot about their condition and help to identify those most in need of preservation according to the latest research by a team led by Matija Strlic from University College London's Centre for Sustainable Heritage state of decay. The results of the study were published on September 17th in a paper entitled ‘Material Degradomics: On the Smell of Old Books’ in the journal Analytical Chemistry. Charles W. Schmidt also reported on the project in ‘On the Smell of Old Books’ published on the journal’s website.

As historical documents age they release a musty odour which is the result of chemical elements called volatile and semivolatile organic compounds (VOCs) from the paper seeping into the air. This smell can explain a lot about the condition of books as the composition of these VOC emissions changes significantly over time. The team, which included researchers from University College London, the Tate, the University of Ljubljana and Morana RTD in Slovenia, has developed a new method to identify the chemicals released by books as they decay. The technique, called material degradomics, links the book’s physical state to its VOC emissions pattern.

Researchers analysed 72 historical papers from the 19th and 20th centuries, including papers made with rosin (a pine tar resin), bleached pulp, groundweed, and rag fibre. They measured the VOCs from these papers and subsequently identified 15 compounds that appeared to show degradation.

It is hoped that such a chemical understanding of the state of degradation of historic documents will help museums and libraries to identify those most in need of preservation. Researchers also claim that the method could help to further develop preservation techniques and could be used on other historical artefacts.

Discovery of Persian army lost in Sahara desert 2,500 years ago?

Discovery of the remains of the 50,000-strong army of the Persian King Cambyses II which was lost in a sandstorm in the Sahara desert 2,500 years ago?
Rossella Lorenzi reports on the latest discovery by the Italian archaeologists Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni on Discovery News.

New Khmer Rouge history textbook released in Cambodia
The Khmer Rouge era disappeared from the national curriculum in Cambodia in the 1990s. The BBC reports on the release of a new textbook about the Pol Pot era which will now be studied in schools.

60 years of Franco-German rapprochement
On the website of the French newspaper Le Figaro a slideshow of photographs taken over the past 60 years charts the main stages of Franco-German rapprochement in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Picturing the First World War: “Cicatrices de Guerre”: 14-18 au quotidien
Cicatrices de Guerre charts the daily lives of French soldiers, ‘Poilus’, during the First World War and was recently published by les editions de la gouttière. It consists of 15 stories compiled by 22 comic strip authors.
An exhibition of their original drawings opened today at the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne. They will remain on display until March 14th.
A slideshow of some of the images is available on the website of Le Figaro.

First Impressions: Bright Star

by Kathryn Hadley

Bright Star was released in cinemas last Friday, November 6th. Written and directed by Jane Campion and inspired by Andrew Motion’s 1997 biography of Keats, the film tells the story of John Keats (1795-1821) and Fanny Brawne’s ill-fated and tragic romance.

John Keats’ began his career as an apothecary surgeon. Soon after passing his medical examinations at Guy’s Hospital in 1816, however, he increasingly devoted himself to literature. He published his first poems and sonnets in a volume entitled Poems in 1817.

The film begins in 1817 when his younger brother Tom begins to show signs of tuberculosis. The two brothers move to lodgings in Well Walk Hampstead and John Keats begins to nurse Tom on a daily basis. It is during this time that Keats meets Fanny Brawne. Tom dies at the very beginning of December 1819 and following his brother’s death, John moves to Hampstead Heath where he shares lodgings with his friend Charles Brown at Wentworth Place. When the Dilke family move out of the adjoining house in April 1819, the Brawne family move into Wentworth Place. John Keats and Fanny Brawne develop a close friendship and some form of engagement is eventually arranged between them.

It was during the spring of 1819 that Keats wrote the ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci as well as Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to Psyche and Ode on Indolence. In June, he and Brown travelled to the Isle of Wight. Upon their return to Hampstead in October 1819, however, Keats began to show the first signs of tuberculosis, suffering to particularly severe attacks in February 1820. His doctors advised him to spend the winter in a warmer climate and his friends raised money for him to travel to Italy. He left in September accompanied by his friend the painter Joseph Severn. They arrived in Rome at the end of the year where they took lodgings in the Piazza di Spagna. Following a relapse in December, John Keats died on February 23rd, 1821, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome.

The film is not strictly historical, but it provides, nonetheless, a compelling insight into daily life and social conventions in early 19th-century England. It is set at a time and in a place when and where consumption was rife. Keats’ mother died of tuberculosis in 1810; his younger brother Tom died in 1819, just two years before John. Keats and Fanny Brawne’s romance was also heavily constrained by the social mores of the time. Their informal engagement was criticised and disapproved of and they were unable to marry due to the precarious state of Keats’ finances.

Bright Star is, above all, a beautiful film in every sense. The costumes, scenery, dialogues and acting are all beautiful to the extent that we are transported and enthralled effortlessly back in time. The film is deeply moving and touching. It is a beautiful tribute to the tragic life of John Keats.

On yesterday’s BBC Radio 4 programme Start the Week Andrew Marr talked to Sue Brown about her new biography of Keats’ friend Joseph Severn entitled Joseph Severn, A Life: The Rewards of Friendship (Oxford University Press).

Costumes from the film are currently on display at Keats House in Hampstead until November 22nd.

Keats House
Keats Grove
Hampstead
London NW3 2RR
Telephone: 020 7332 3868
http://www.keatshouse.cityoflondon.gov.uk/

For further information on disease in 19th-century Britain, visit our History of Medicine focus page.
For further information on the surprising passion for boxing of many Romantic poets such as John Keats, read our article by John Strachan Poets & Pugilists.

Images: (City of London, Keats House)

- Miniature of John Keats by Joseph Severn

- The engagement ring that Keats gave to Fanny Brawne

- Ambrotype portrait of Fanny Brawne-Lindon (1855)

Brain surgery in Ireland in AD800 and the campaign to 'Hold onto the Hoard'

Brain surgery in Ireland over 1,000 years ago
The Irish Times reports on the discovery of a burial ground in Donegal which shows that brain surgery was being carried out in Ireland in AD800.

“Hold onto the Hoard”
Tristram Hunt argues in The Guardian that the Staffordshire Hoard should be returned to the kingdom of Mercia where it was found.
We recently published an article by Tristram Hunt in our April issue. For further information, read No Marx without Engels in which he describes how Engels financed the research behind his friend Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

‘It is time, perhaps, for Wolfe’s name to resonate as much as Nelson’s’
In an article on the website of The Times, Andrew Riley comments on how the 250th anniversary of James Wolfe’s victory over the French in Canada at the battle of Quebec has gone largely unnoticed in Britain.
The feature article of our September issue was devoted to the battle of Quebec. In General Wolfe's Men in Quebec, Stephen Brumwell argues that a crucial ingredient in Wolfe’s victory was the professionalism of the army he had helped to create.

Death of Vitaly Ginzburg
The Russian physicist who worked on Soviet atomic bomb project and later won Nobel Prize for physics in 2003 died in Moscow on Sunday, aged 93. Read the article on the Reuters website.

James VI of Scotland’s lavish spending
The Times reports on a recent study by Julian Goodare from the University of Edinburgh about James VI’s spending before his accession to the English throne. The study entitled ‘The debts of James VI of Scotland’ is published in this month’s issue of The Economic Review.

Scottish campaign to preserve India’s imperial buildings
On the website of Herald Scotland Martin Williams reports on the recent announcement of a Scottish Government campaign to renovate some of the decaying imperial buildings in Kolkata associated with Scottish buildings and businesses.

November 9th is not just the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall
On November 9th, 1938, Nazi Germany launched a pogrom against its Jewish population. Over 2,000 people died. On November 9th, 1918 the monarchy fell in Berlin and the German Republic was born. November 9th, 1923, is the date of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch. Read the article on the Spiegel Online.

Memories of the ‘Man who opened the Berlin Wall’
In an interview with Spiegel Online, Lieutenant-Colonel Harald Jäger, who was in charge of the East Berlin checkpoint at Bornholmer Strasse and was the first border guard to allow East Germans to cross over to the West, recalls his memories of the night of November 9th.

Celebrating the Fall of the Berlin Wall

by Kathryn Hadley

World leaders, including Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Gordon Brown, are gathered in Berlin today to mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. There is an article reporting on today’s commemorative events on the website of Bloomberg.
A video of Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, in which she recalls her memories of time, was also posted on the website of the German Chancellery two days ago.

Here is a selection of some of the events organised in London today and over the coming week to celebrate the anniversary.

1989: The fall of the Berlin Wall
November 9th, 7pm
Frontline Club

13 Norfolk Place

London W2 1QJ

Telephone: 020 7479 8950
http://www.frontlineclub.com/
Journalists who were in Berlin at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall will discuss their experiences of the time. Speakers include Sky News political correspondent Glen Oglaza, BBC correspondent Nick Thorpe, Ann Leslie of the Daily Mail and Peter Millar, author of 1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall.

Ice Wall in London
November 9th, until 8pm
Outside the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany
23 Belgrave Square
London SW1X 8PZ
A 11.5 ft Ice Wall art installation commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is on display outside the German Embassy. It consists of a frozen fragment of a wall made out of ice which looks as though it is about to crumble and fall down.

The Goethe-Institut in London is also hosting various events.
Goethe-Institut London
50 Princes Gate

Exhibition Road

London SW7 2PH

Telephone: 020 7596 4000
www.goethe.de/london

DJ Ben Klock
November 9th, 11pm – 2am
Soon after the collapse of the Berlin Wall young people from East Berlin celebrated at Techno parties in the West and a few months later the first Techno clubs opened in former East Berlin. DJ Ben Klock from the Techno club Berghain, located close to the former no-man’s land around the Berlin Wal,l will recreate soundtracks which were played twenty years ago.

November Days: Live TV Coverage
November 9th, until 5pm
A video installation showing a collage of some of the best pictures broadcast on television channels in Paris, London, New York and Moscow at the time. The videos are accompanied by recent interviews with the journalists who posted the original reports.

Harlan: In the Shadow of the Jew Sϋss
November 12th, 7.30pm
Veit Harlan was one of the Third Reich’s most prominent filmmakers. He made various films under the supervision of Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, which included an anti-Semitic reworking of Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Jud Süß, released in Germany in 1940. However, during the post-war De-Nazification trials he was twice cleared of wrongdoing.
This documentary by Felix Moeller explores Harlan’s complicity in mass murder through interviews with members of his extensive family. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Felix Moeller, Jessica Jacoby, grand-daughter of Veit Harlan, as well as film historian, Professor Erica Carter (Warwick University), a specialist in German and Nazi cinema.

A Borderline Case – The Fall of the Berlin Wall
Until December 18th
A display of photographs by Norbert Enker who photographed the changes along the former border between East and West Germany from December 1989 to March 1992.

First Impressions: The Ashmolean Transformed

Peter Furtado, the previous editor of History Today, comments on Rick Mather’s extension of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, which re-opened on Saturday and reveals a rich collection of old favourites and hidden treasures.

New-look Ashmolean is Britain's museum of the decade

The £61 million rebuilding of Britain’s oldest public museum doubles the exhibition space and increases the number of objects on display by 600%. It has been widely praised as an architectural and museological triumph.

The old museum, housed behind an 1845 Neoclassical facade by Charles Cockerell,
was a rabbit-warren of crowded and sometimes rather forbidding rooms. Yet it housed a remarkable collection spanning world history, from Pre-dynastic Egypt and the Minoan civilisation, through medieval and Renaissance Europe to modern Oriental ceramics.

Some of the long-familiar objects are of the highest quality, including the Alfred Jewel, a Stradivarius violin and drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael. Many equally fine pieces now have been put alongside them, with pride of place going to a newly identified and recently acquired Titian. Others such as T.E. Lawrence’s Arabian robes have been allowed out of conservation for the first time, thanks to the building’s improved environmental controls.

The new museum, which opened on November 7th , looks almost identical to the old from outside - except that the old blue doors, which had been kept mainly closed, have been replaced by a fine revolving glass door that invites the visitor into the airy atrium. The new extension itself is hidden by surrounding buildings.

Mather is a doyen of museum architects, who has skilfully merged old and new at the National Maritime Museum, Wallace Collection and Dulwich Art Gallery extensions, as well as several other projects within Oxford itself.

Inside, the space is transformed, though Cockerell’s gracious interior, such as the Ionic columns and the cantilever staircase, remains, with the collections they housed (some, like the dark Egyptian gallery, are to be redone over the coming years). The new extension includes glass bridges, an atrium and a cascading staircase conducting the visitor through the collections.

These collections are taken out of their typological ghettoes, and arranged through 39 galleries and four levels in a broadly chronological structure which climbs up the building and draws attention to the cross-fertilisation between cultures.

The lower ground floor contains a kind of power-pack for the whole enterprise, with an excellent room on the Tradescant Ark (the cabinet of curiosities with which the museum began in the 1630s) and its eponymous founder Elias Ashmole, plus others about collecting, identifying and conserving the museum’s objects. The glass bridges, leading back and forth across time, allow the visitor to catch glimpses across time. The result is both visually and intellectually exciting.

This display gives a sense of a museum absolutely packed with treasures. It is the work of the design group Metaphor, who were responsible for the display of the Terracotta Army in the British Museum in 2007, in association with the museum team led by director Sir Christopher Brown. The result is a beautiful, exciting and revelatory experience, which is accessible yet free from the distractions of unnecessary electronic wizardry.

Unfortunately, not everything was ready for the opening on Saturday. Some cases are unfinished, some rooms are full of boxes and others quite empty. Many labels were also missing, making it hard to judge the interpretation. But thankfully there are relatively few signs of the patronising ‘hands-on’ displays that interrupt the enjoyment of many other modern galleries. There is, though, a major new educational centre and a real effort to engage new and young audiences.

When the visitor has completed the journey, there is a choice of refreshments: a fine new rooftop restaurant or the long-established café in the vaults – which has long been the best place in Oxford to meet friends, to talk books and business.

http://www.ashmolean.org/

Remembrance Day Round-up

by Kathryn Hadley

Here is a selection of some of the events taking place over the weekend and next week for Remembrance Day.

Remembrance Day Unveiling
November 8th, 10.45am
St James’ Church, Mill Lane,
West Derby
Liverpool L12 7JA
Following five months work, the newly restored glass war memorial in St James’ Church will be unveiled on Sunday. The monument commemorates the dead of both world wars and features the doomed liner Lusitania which was sunk by a German U-boat submarine off the Irish coast on May 7th, 1915, upon its return to Liverpool from New York. Nearly 1,200 lives were lost. The memorial is made up of nearly 3,000 pieces of colourful glass embedded into mortar, a technique known as opus sectile (Latin for ‘cut work’) which was popular in ancient Rome. A sandstone surround was later added to the memorial in memory of the fallen on the Second World War.

The Imperial War Museum is organising a series of events in each of its local branches. http://www.iwm.org.uk/

Imperial War Museum London
Ceremony of Remembrance
November 8th, 11.00am
The Last Post will be sounded by a member of the Merton Sea Cadets, followed by two minutes' silence. This will be followed by a performance by the Solaris Quartet of Benjamin Cox's winning piece from the In Memoriam Young Composer's Competition, written to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the end of the First World War.

Armistice Day Ceremony of Remembrance
November 11th, 11.00am
The Last Post and Reveille will be sounded by a member of The Band of The Brigade of Gurkhas, followed by readings from Forgotten Voices of the Somme by author Joshua Levine.

Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms
Remembrance Saturday
November 7th, 11.00am and 1.00pm
Members of the Westminster Community Reminiscence and Archive Group will talk about their wartime experiences, including evacuation and working in the ARP and the Women's Land Army.

Imperial War Museum Duxford
Remembrance Sunday
November 8th
At 11am there will be a candle-lighting ceremony in the American Air Museum in remembrance of the US Forces who fought and died in the Second World War. A remembrance service will thereafter be held at 12.30pm. Admission to the museum will be free for all and the museum’s Department for Learning will be organising various hands-on activities for children throughout the day.

They Can’t Blackout the Moon
November 8th, 3pm
National Portrait Gallery
St Martin's Place
London WC2H 0HE
http://www.npg.org.uk/
Anne Harvey and Peter Marinker will read from poets, writers and memorabilia reflecting warfare and life on the Home Front during the Second World War. Poetry by Keith Douglas, Alan Lewis and Sidney Keyes and the writings of RAF pilot, Richard Hillary will be featured. Snippets from the archive, Mass Observation, will focus on memories of rationing, evacuation, the blitz and the blackout.

Their Past Your Future – Honouring the Passing of the First World War Generation
November 11th
A national ceremony will be held at Westminster Abbey to recognise the contribution of both the military and the civilian population in the First World War. The ceremony will be attended by The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh, members of the Armed Forces and the government, ambassadors and high commissioners.
21 young people will also be present as representatives of the Imperial War Museum and will escort VC recipients Johnson Beharry VC and Mark Donaldson VC. They will be reporting live on the website www.radiowaves.co.uk/90.
To mark the event, the Ministry of Defence (MOD), the Imperial War Museum and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission have also launched a website offering remembrance-themed education resources. http://www.passingofthegeneration.org.uk/

Remembrance Day at the Museum of London Docklands
November 11th, 11am
West India Quay
London E14 4AL
Telephone: 020 7001 9844
http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/
A remembrance service will be organised for local men and women, led by the Docklands chaplain and accompanied by the FSA choir.

Great War Portraits
There is a slideshow of portraits of survivors of the First World War on the BBC website, which are extracts from Great War Portraits a new book by Keith Collman featuring portraits of over 40 veterans compiled over the past 25 years.

News: The Blitz was a clean-up operation in Europe in the aftermath of WW2

40% of young people aged 9 to 15 do not know that Remembrance Day falls on November 11th
In the run-up to Remembrance Day, the war veterans' charity Erskine conducted a study of 2,000 young people aged 9 to 15 to test their knowledge of facts of the two world wars. The results were shocking: the Blitz was a clean-up operation in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and the SS was Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven. Read a report of the study on the Mail Online.

Collector buys unseen Charlie Chaplin film for £3.20 on eBay
The film may have been designed as a First World War propaganda piece. It is estimated that it is now worth between £3,000 and £40,000. Charlotte Higgins reports on the website of The Guardian.

What Lies Beneath: British Experiences of the Cold War
To mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Imperial War Museum is launching a series of newly recorded personal stories as part of its online exhibition ‘What Lies Beneath’. The exhibition features a selection of twenty personal stories which document the experiences of British men, women and children during the Cold War. They include interviews with Sir Kenneth Adam, the set designer for the James Bond films in the 1960s and 1970s, and the comedian Alexei Sayle, whose father’s involvement in left-wing politics meant that his family were able to visit countries behind the Iron Curtain. The site will be launched on November 9th.
http://www.whatliesbeneath.org.uk/

The first ever film version of A Christmas Carol
In anticipation of the release of Disney’s A Christmas Carol, the BFI National Archive has recently launched the earliest surviving adaptation of Dickens’ work on film on its YouTube channel. Scrooge or Marley’s Ghost was produced in 1901 by the British silent pioneer R.W. Paul.
http://www.youtube.com/BFIfilms

And the winner of the 2009 Georgian Group Architectural Awards is…
Cairness House in Aberdeenshire
Francesca Steele reports on the website of The Times.

Mikhail Gorbachev on why the world has not changed for the better since the fall of the Berlin Wall
On the website of The Guardian.

The Gunpowder Plot and the deteriorating tomb of the Black Prince

BBC television series about the ‘Land Girls’ criticised for historical inaccuracy
Urmee Khan reports in an article on the website of The Telegraph.

Tomb of Black Prince Dangerously Deteriorating
Stained glass windows in Canterbury Cathedral, which overlook the tomb of Edward, Prince of Wales, were broken by Puritan iconoclasts in the 1640s. Damaging UV rays have since entered the cathedral unfiltered, damaging the paintwork on the canopy over the Prince of Wales’ tomb. The Telegraph reports.

Lewes Anti-Popery Shenanigans
The Times Archive features a letter which the Baptist minister of Lewes wrote to The Times in 1884 about whether the annual Bonfire Night festivities should be banned.

How much of the House of Commons would Guy Fawkes actually have succeeded in blowing up?
The Fragments blog features extracts about the Gunpowder Plot, including quotes from the confession of Thomas Winter, one of the principal plotters.

U2 concert to celebrate fall of Berlin Wall
U2 will stage a short concert this evening at the Brandenburg Gate to celebrate the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The Irish Times reports.

Statue of Sir Keith Park unveiled yesterday on Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square
The statue was unveiled yesterday afternoon during a ceremony attended by Boris Johnson, the Chairman of the Sir Keith Park Memorial Campaign, Terry Smith, the Chief of the Air Staff Air, Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Dalton, Second World War RAF veterans, and members of the Park family. Supporters of the Sir Keith Park Memorial Campaign were also present, including actor Edward Fox and the Battle of Britain historian Dr Stephen Bungay.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park led the Royal Air Force forces over London and the South East of England throughout the Battle of Britain. His statue is designed to commemorate the c.2950 pilots from 15 countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Jamaica, Belgium, South Africa, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States, who fought to defend Britain during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Today, there are just over 105 survivors.
The statue will remain on the fourth plinth until May 2010. A permanent statue of Park will thereafter be unveiled on September 15th, 2010, in Waterloo Place to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.

The death of the Naza civilisation and the discovery of an Iron Age treasure hoard

£1 million hoard of Iron Age gold necklaces unearthed in Scotland
Following the discovery of the Staffordshire hoard in July, an amateur treasure hunter, David Booth, recently found four torcs, which date from the 1st to the 3rd century BC, with his metal detector in a field near Stirling. The discovery has been described as the most significant find of Iron Age work in the country and may revolutionise our understanding of ancient Scottish history. The Scotsman and The Times report.

Did deforestation kill the Nazca civilisation?
Reuters reports on a study released yesterday by the University of Cambridge which has suggested that the demise of the ancient Nazca civilisation in Peru was hastened by deforestation. The Nazca people are believed to have felled large numbers of huarango trees to clear valleys for farming thus upsetting the ecosystem. The findings are published in the journal Latin American Antiquity.

Sale of controversial Chinese stamp
The BBC reports on the sale of a 1968 Chinese stamp that was withdrawn from circulation the day it was issued because it failed to show Taiwan as part of communist China. The stamp sold for £290,000.

Argentina’s last military ruler on trial
Argentina’s last military ruler Reynaldo Bignone, who was president from 1982-83, went on trial on Monday, along with five other retired generals accused of torture and murders in the Campo de Mayo military base, one of the country’s largest torture centres during the military dictatorship. Read the article by the Associated Press.

Photos of the East German frontier then and now
At the beginning of March 1981, Jurgen Ritter set off from the town of Schnackenburg in Lower Saxony near the border separating East and West Germany to begin his journey south along the frontier of East Germany on the western side. He recalls his two-year journey, from the Baltic Sea to the Czech border, in an article on the Spiegel Online. Ritter recently retraced his journey to photograph the same sites a second time. The article features a slideshow comparing both sets of images.

New treasures on display at the Brontë Parsonage Museum
A collection of items that belonged to Charlotte Brontë was recently donated to the museum by a private owner living in Canada. The owner’s great grandfather was the nephew of Mary Anna Bell, the second wife of Arthur Bell Nicholls. Nicholls’ first marriage was to Charlotte Brontë, who died the year after their marriage.
Further information is available on the Brontë Parsoange Blog.

Hunger marches in Ireland and the history of Halloween: November 2nd: today's top history news

77 years ago today: hunger marches across Ireland
The Irish Times archive reports on hunger marches that took place across Ireland on November 2nd, 1932, as a reaction to the effects of the Great Depression.

The Hollow History of Halloween
In The Telegraph Christopher Howse reports on the history of Halloween. Fritz Lang’s

Metropolis to be screened at Berlin International Film Festival, 83 years after it was first premiered
Metropolis was the first ever film to be granted World Heritage status by UNESCO. It was premiered in Berlin in 1927 and, at the time, was the most expensive German film ever made. Shortly after, however, the film was cut into a much shorter version. The cut 30 minutes were believed to be lost until they were discovered in Argentina last year. The film will be shown in its complete uncut version at the Berlin International Film Festival in February next year. The Spiegel Online reports.

Former participants in Chile’s ‘dirty war’ offer to confess
Al Jazeera reports on how a group of Pinochet-era soldiers want to sign a group confession on abuses committed during the dictator’s government.

Original US Second World War propaganda films
The Classic Cinema Online website features original US propaganda films from the Second World War with great footage of Spitfire dogfights and different types of combat.

Coming to terms with the past in Shanghai
In Chinese history textbooks, the period after the 1840 Opium War is referred to as the ‘century of humiliation’ during which Shanghai was successively occupied by French, British, American, Russian and Japanese forces. In an article on the website of The Telegraph, Malcolm Moore reports on the city’s plans to restore its former British Consulate built in 1873. Is Shanghai gradually coming to terms with its history of foreign occupation?

John F. Kennedy’s reaction to the construction of the Berlin Wall
In the Spiegel Online, Gregor Peter Schmitz interviews William R. Smyser who was a US diplomat stationed in Berlin at the time of the construction of the Berlin Wall.