Art and Architecture, mainly

At the University of Cambridge in the 1930s, Guy Burgess (1911-63) was in a group of upper middle-class students who believed that capitalism could never be democratic and that Germany, USA and UK were rapidly moving to the right. His friends, all e...

Marguerite Alibert (1890-1971) was born in Paris to working class parents. Young Marguerite was blamed for not having watched her baby brother properly so as a punishment, her parents sent her to the Sisters of Mary. The nuns reminded her daily that...

1919 was a landmark year in many countries, for both good and bad. Consider Amritsar Massacre of 1919 - did it end the British Raj? The Versailles Peace Treaty (1919) was doomed to fail and A separate Irish parliament in Dublin and the Irish War...

JA Holden & Co was first established in Adelaide in 1856 by James Holden as a leather and saddlery business. Henry Adolph Frost join­ed as a business partner in 1885, and the company was renamed Hold­en & Frost Ltd. Many thanks to the ABC a...

Anne-Louise Willoughby wrote her book Nora Heysen: a Port­rait very well. The daughter of famous artist father Hans Heysen, Nora (1911-2003) was born in Hahn­dorf Sth Australia, and received her early art train­ing from her dad...

Judaism was first practised in Van Diemen's Land by male convicts or free settlers from London’s Jewish East End. Lack of wives had made it difficult to form a trad­it­ion­al Jewish community, but by the 1840s the num­bers had increased and thr...

Zubin Mehta, born in 1936 in India, to a Parsi Zoroastrian family. It was said that the Parsis in India were more receptive to European influence than the Hindus or Muslims. The lad was ind­ucted early into the musical world by his father, Mehli Meh...