Nick Higham
@highamnews.bsky.social
520 followers 780 following 500 posts
Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One published by Bloomsbury 9 October. Water news, London history, laundry, ghost pubs etc. Former BBC correspondent…
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highamnews.bsky.social
I am at the Isle of Wight Literary Festival on Sunday morning. Come hear about the Kipling character who went to war for real, the younger brother of a British general with an addiction to dangerous sports and the lad from Liverpool who spent his life in fear of communist assassination… #Mavericks
highamnews.bsky.social
Great pictures by Thomas Purkis of my talk in Lichfield the other day promoting my new book Mavericks. Great audience too, some good questions, and they bought lots of copies…!
highamnews.bsky.social
This could be awkward for the BBC: CBS News is its US partner…
Reposted by Nick Higham
dymvue.bsky.social
I think we need more bishops - well, more people - with these names.
highamnews.bsky.social
Excellent review by Julian Evans in the Telegraph of Mavericks. He calls it “stimulating” and gives it four stars. “Higham has written an entertaining and instructive account of how empires can be fatally weakened by overreach and arrogance…”
highamnews.bsky.social
Art of Laundry. Georges Hugnet, Untitled (laundry and legs collage), 1933-1936. Hugnet was a French graphic artist, writer, art historian, critic and film director, and a figure in the Dada movement and Surrealism…
highamnews.bsky.social
Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Gabriella Benzi. Christian Eckardt (Danish painter, 1832-1914). Drying sheets on the shore before Split, Croatia 1893. Oil on paper laid down on board…
highamnews.bsky.social
Art of Laundry. Via FB/A World of washing/Isabel Amaral Lapa Vasques. Cover for the magazine
McCall's by Hubbard Sundblom, 1933. Laundry (which was jolly hard work in reality) also lent itself to rather saccharine and sentimental treatments in art like this…
highamnews.bsky.social
Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Isabel Amaral Lapa Vasques. “Wind of Change" by contemporary Russian artist Emilia Shelamova…
highamnews.bsky.social
Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Rita M. Sjöholm. Iman Maleki 1976. Iranian Realist painter…
highamnews.bsky.social
Sad news. ‘The Fields Beneath’ and ‘The House by the Thames’ are two of the best books ever written about London’s history. I hadn’t realised till I looked her up how wide was her range, or that she started by writing fiction…
thegentleauthor.bsky.social
It is with a heart full of emotion that I have to announce that my good friend the historian GILLIAN TINDALL died on Wednesday aged 86. In February, Gillian asked me to publish her final work, JOURNAL OF A MAN UNKNOWN, which comes out on 6th November. spitalfieldslife.bigcartel.com
highamnews.bsky.social
London’s sewer system. A product of heroic Victorian endeavour and spectacularly over-specified engineering (which is why it’s lasted so well…!)
londonstone.bsky.social
The 'Great Stink' of 1858, when MPs could no longer work in Parliament due to the stench from the Thames, finally spurred action to clean up the polluted river. Read here about the creation of the Victorian sewer system, still in operation today www.thehistoryoflondon.co.uk/the-great-st...
Reposted by Nick Higham
hughpearman.bsky.social
So Sir Terry Farrell has died, aged 87, a fortnight after his one-time architectural partner Sir Nicholas Grimshaw. Farrell was a particularly talented large-scale urbanist. An era ends.
highamnews.bsky.social
Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Isabel Amaral Lapa Vasques. Emilie Mundt (1842-1922). Women washing at a well, 1880. Mundt was a Danish artist known for her paintings of children and peasants. She lived for a time in the artists’ colony at Pont-Aven in Britanny…
highamnews.bsky.social
Art of Laundry. Via FB/A world of washing/Alicia Silvia Tessari. Désiré François Laugée (1823-1896). The Laundress, 1882. He was a successful painter of historical and religious subjects who later turned towards naturalism, though one critic thought his peasants “too delicate…”
Reposted by Nick Higham
bromleyj.bsky.social
He'll hogget the lamblight.
Reposted by Nick Higham
oldtrotter.bsky.social
A reminder of the last time a "prince across the water" marched on London via the NW (and he didn't even have to contend with the bond markets).
highamnews.bsky.social
Dunsterforce’s commander was Maj-Gen Lionel Dunsterville, famous as a school friend of Kipling and model for Kipling’s schoolboy anti-hero Stalky. Dunsterforce, just 1200 strong, had no hope of saving Baku but did hold the Turks off for six precious weeks…
highamnews.bsky.social
At Euston. Just so long as the train isn’t 200 years old…
highamnews.bsky.social
The massacre of the 26 Commissars became one of the founding legends of the Soviet Union. And the British got the blame; in this famous painting by Ivan Brodsky there are three British officers at far left watching the execution. In reality none were closer than 200 miles away…
Reposted by Nick Higham
fakehistoryhunter.net
Just your annual reminder to raise a glass to Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov who on this date in 1983 saved your life when he decided to wait for evidence in stead of passing on the message that could have caused armageddon.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_So...
highamnews.bsky.social
I’ll be at Lichfield Cathedral @lichfieldcathedral.bsky.social lunchtime Sunday talking about my new book Mavericks and the remarkable characters involved in the Forgotten Battle of World War One — including the brave men of the local N Staffs regiment who fought to the death in Baku…
highamnews.bsky.social
Well spotted. Life, art, what’s the difference? Though not much comedy that I can see at present…