"A fresh, funny, and utterly charming spin on Dickens' classic." - Rotten Tomatoes.
Here’s to you, A Handful of History - 5 creative things on history I thought were worth sharing. Enjoy!
It is 150 years since CHARLES DICKENS died. Last weekend I jumped on board this brilliant online course provided by the Idler Academy: “The Life and Works of Charles Dickens”. Did you know that “Oliver Twist” - probably - was inspired by the biography (with the long title): “A Memoir of Robert Blincoe - about an orphan boy sent from the workhouse of St. Pancras, London, at seven years of age to endure the Horrors of a Cotton-Mill, through his infancy and youth, with a minute detail of his sufferings, being the first memoir of the kind published”? You can read it for free at Project Gutenberg (warning: It is rather brutal)
If you are into recycling, these PSYCHEDELIC FISH FACE-MASKS might be something. Maria Popovich over at Brainpickings has added colours to the world’s first encyclopedia of fishes (which originally was made by a British spy in 1719), and it looks absolutely wonderful! The amazing sea creatures are available as both posters and face masks.
R.I.P. GAME OF THRONES actor, Dame Diana Rigg. Despite her family’s working-class background, Diana Rigg lived the first 8 years of her life in Rajasthan in the northern part of India, surrounded by servants, gardeners, and nannies. It was back in the days of the British Empire, and it all began with her father who saw an advertisement in the Times for engineers to go to India to work on the railway. Read more about Diana Rigg in my “We Need to Talk About the British Empire”-review.
I’ve just received EAT THE BUDDHA and I am really looking forward to reading it! It is, in short, about modern Tibetan and Chinese history, as told through the private lives of the Tibetans themselves: A princess whose family is wiped out during the Cultural Revolution, an entrepreneur who falls in love with a Chinese woman, a Tibetan schoolgirl forced to choose at an early age between her family and the elusive lure of Chinese money, and more. The book is written by the American author and journalist Barbara Demick who also wrote “Nothing to Envy - Ordinary Lives in North Korea” (which I highly recommend!). Eat the Buddha is longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2020.
This guy has BUILT A 1980s TRAIN IN HIS BASEMENT, a life-size replica of the train that took him from Toronto to Montreal to visit his grandmother when he was a little boy. WAOW!
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See you next time.
Majken xx
The world's first encyclopedia of fishes was made by a British spy in 1719.
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