@blackwellbooks Good evening! So exciting to see Reynard out and about in the world at last! @blackwellbooks The character of the trickster fox, humorously winning through his superior wits, stretches all the way back to Ancient Greece, to Aesop’s fables. Reynard’s essential traits & many of the supporting characters are rooted there, such as Noble the Lion or Isengrim the Wolf. 1/7

A wild beat of protective feathers & tempered steel for Michaelmas.

Архангел Михаил – Archangel Michael
Andrei Rublev
1414; Zvenigorod. Архангел Михаил – Archangel Michael
Vladimir Borovikovsky
1815

Does anyone know what this is or where it might be from? It seems like a magical artefact of some kind - it was in an old suitcase, bought from a house sale, I believe, a number of years ago. @Pitt_Rivers - I wonder if you might know where this is from?

Martinmas Eve & the wolves are gathering up by Gallow Down farm. The November sky is dark with snow. She puts on her velvet dress of apple-red, of sour haws & blood, & makes him borage tea & fries eel over the fire. He is lost, oh, he is as lost as a man can be. Ivan Shishkin (1832–1898), In the Wild North, «На севере диком..», 1891, Kyiv National Picture Gallery.

The poet Ono no Komachi 小野 小町 praying for rain.
Attributed to Torii Kiyomitsu
ca. 1765
@metmuseum Once, during a drought, Ono no Komachi inscribed a poem on a slip of paper & placed it in a little boat, which she then set sail on a pond in the Shinsen-en Garden to pray for rain. Her poem was so powerful that the rain began to pour, continuing for three days.

An Edwardian evening gown, angry with coal-jet beads, for a desperate night of thunder & spite-forked lightning & heavy rain on lake water & drifts of pale apricot roses, for the dog days of a hard & blasted summer, for the blue smoke & pale distant light of September. For @EleanorFranzen, a dress for difficult times. xxxxx

August Strindberg, The Town, 1903, Nationalmuseum Sweden, Stockholm.

A cooling thread of rock pools, of sea lettuce & snakelocks, hermit crabs and shannies, gobies and rocklings.

Rockpool and a Boat
William Henry Charlton (1846–1918)
Hatton Gallery Norman’s Woe from Wonson’s Cove, East Gloucester, Sept. 1917, Augustus W. Buhler
James B. Hand Fine Art

A thread of noble couraged unicorns for a feverish & unsettled week. However diminuitive, however trapped, these are still creatures of power, not placidity: “A very fierce and strong creature,” wrote John Trapp in 1657.

The Unicorn
Eric O'Dea (fl. 1934–1938)
Doncaster Museum Saint Justina with the Unicorn
Moretto da Brescia
1530

In 2008, I co-curated the first major exhibition concerned with slavery & the slave trade in Oxford. Junie James & I did a huge amount of research & what we found most significant was the sheer centrality of Oxford to slavery. It inculcated & quietly legitimised the trade. Hundreds of men with economic & political interests in the slave trade attended the University, following the same old classical curriculum which taught of the natural & commonplace presence of slaves in a society. Slavery, cried Oxford, is the mark of a civilised society.

A small thread about my father's perilous adventures with dangerous illnesses in the late 1930s and early 1940s. I used to love these stories when I was small - particularly the gruesome medical details (which I won't share). In the mid 1930s, my father, Ronnie (pictured) got caught up in a cholera epidemic in Hungary. He'd travelled there in a sort of British Council-type capacity - teaching English, organising cultural events, strengthening Anglo-Hungarian ties. He was about 21 years old.