It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
The 19th century witnessed the rise of the celebrity musician. Previously, musicians were wholly dependent on aristocratic or ecclesiastical patrons, and their output was determined by the wishes of these sometimes despotic individuals. Bach, for instance, was a mere Kapellmeister, and Haydn was not much more than a court servant. Even Mozart was unhappily dependent …
Continue reading ‘Lisztomania’: Franz Liszt, sex, and celebrity
Dancing, wrote Philip Stubbes in 1583, is altogether a "horrible vice". In his infamous work The Anatomie of Abuses, Stubbes protested, "what clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what smouching and slabbering of one another: what filthy groping and unclean handling is not practised everywhere in these dancings". For dancing "provoketh lust, and the …
Following several festive-themed posts, a three week Christmas break and the latest installment of Miss Tickletoby's Lectures on English History, now for something completely different. For most people in the Anglo-Saxon world at least, Danish history is a blank, perhaps filled in only by vague memories of Hamlet's line "something is rotten in the state …
Continue reading Johann Struensee, the German doctor who ruled Denmark