International – Page 14 – For the fainthearted . . .

The other side of the Great War

“Sir, it’s the 107th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand,” said one of the Year 8 class.

Indeed, it is.

The assassination of the Austrian archduke, on this day in June 1914, by a Bosnian nationalist in Sarajevo triggered an illogical, cataclysmic chain reaction across Europe. The Austrians declared war on Serbia; the Russians declared war on the Austrians; the Germans declared war on the Russians, even though they had not liked Archduke Ferdinand; and the downward spiral into hell continued.

The war depended on the demonization of the …

Great War caused by a mistake

It being the closing days of the month of June, the Year 7 history lessons seem to be looking at the outbreak of the First War.

Going into my colleague’s classroom after this morning’s lesson, I noticed notes on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the whiteboard. I wanted to add a satirical graffito from college days, “Archduke Franz Ferdinand found alive – First World War a mistake,” but he thought it not a wise thing to do.

Yet read the accounts of events in Sarajevo on 28th June …

A cult band

On Chris Hawkins’ BBC Radio 6 programme, the weekly “My Space” feature was not about someone’s home, as is usually the case, but instead was a presentation of Use Hearing Protection, an exhibition telling the story of Factory Records’ formative years from 1978 to 1982 at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester. The curator narrating the visit described a poster for a concert featuring the bands A Certain Ratio, Durutti Column, and Blurt.

Durutti Column? I remembered the name. It appeared in a piece in the LSE student …

Geniuses

It was on this day in 1882 that the Russian Composer Igor Stravinsky was born.

The composer was a man whose tastes must have been eclectic, for I remember hearing an anecdote about an encounter between Stravinsky, who would probably have been seventy at the time, and the jazz musician Charlie Parker, thirty-eight years his junior.

Stravinsky and a group of friends had gone to a club where Parker and his band were playing and had taken a table in front of the stage. The band had come out for …

Babbage knew that if you put garbage in, you get garbage out

One winter, in days as a curate, I attended the Friday evening meetings of a local camera club. I knew nothing about photography and hadn’t a camera (well, not the sort of camera one might have taken to a club meeting), but had a friend who was an enthusiastic amateur. Mostly the talk was of f-stops and shutter speeds and was of little interest to a passing outsider, but the anoraks and geeks sometimes allowed speakers who talked of photography in an altogether different way.

One Friday, there was a …

American affluence

It was on this day in 1927 that Charles Lindbergh enjoyed a ticker tape parade down New York’s Fifth Avenue after his success the previous month in completing the first solo transatlantic flight, from New York to Paris, in his aircraft the Spirit of Saint Louis.

Lindbergh was a major figure in a time that was surveyed by Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America, 1927 which reveals an extraordinary picture of inter-war American life. Bryson writes:

“To a foreign visitor arriving in America for the first time in 1927, the most

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