2018 – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

In praise of oranges

A First World War letter from a Palestinian orange grove, an orange (lower case) song, and this winter’s favourite orange cake recipe.

Truman Ward Ingersoll, diorama of an orange tree in Los Angeles

Winchester is the centre of English civilisation

Sez Lucio Vicente López in Recuerdos de viaje (1881). This is apparently in part due to the Normans having invaded without women, thus enabling the maintenance of The Saxon Character. He’s wrong. Winchester is suspiciously continental, while Romsey is Ethelflaeda, who sang psalms while skinny-dipping in the Test, and lithe & lusty hooligans.

Thomas De Quincey on the sewers as a conduit for small boys from Winchester College to the downtown pubs

With his guide to the Ziph language, and with the death of a Savoyard organ-grinder’s white mouse, of which he was probably not the author in any sense.

The Mousie's Funeral, from <i>The Sunbeam</i> in 1882.

Whatever became of Christian Lehmann, pioneering Petersburg Shrovetide zookeeper, Pierrot, illusionist, showman?

Newly uncovered evidence shows that, following the fire which destroyed his Russian theatrical business in 1836, he and his family pursued a career in London and Europe, before repeating their Petersburg triumphs in the USA and Australia. Also, a very curious copyright case.

Konstantin Makovsky's classic (sentimental?) 1869 painting of carnival at Admiralty Square in St. Petersburg.

Organ-grinder tweets for December 2017

More inanity from the Hackney organity.