Amsterdam: Bicycle Capital of the World

Amsterdam has a people population of 785,910 [trueknowledge dot com]  and a bicycle population of around 465,000: a ratio of one bicycle for every 1.69 persons.

Running on pedal power instead of CO2 producing toxic fuel, Amsterdammers wend their ways along the colour-coded  bike paths, and if they run low of fuel simply stop to eat a banana, then with calories replenished continue on their way.

Cycling in the city crosses socio-economic as well as gender and age backgrounds."80% of all Dutch cycle at least once a week".[amsterdamize dot com] Bike rental companies abound allowing tourists to go native. And with 400 kilometres of bike routes there's no nook or cranny of the city which cannot be explored.

H.G. Wells said: "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race". In our oil-driven, car-crazy, cult-consumer economy, these relics of the Nineteenth Century happily break the rules. And nowhere is the counter-culture more alive than in Amsterdam: the Bicycle Capital of the World.

George Bernard Shaw, the Left's new Fashion Guru

George Bernard Shaw

Mr George Bernard Shaw proved as enigmatic as ever when asked about his new role as fashion correspondent. "A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic", he quipped, as he made his way in panama hat, ankle-length overcoat, summer pants and carrying a  parasol/umbrella, to his latest fashion assignment.


Mr Shaw, who is famed for his dramatic works on the most pressing social issues of the day, and for his socialist views on the class system, was asked about how he saw his new job. He thought for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders and said: "A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less". He then hopped aboard a passing omnibus and went merrily on his way.


We wish him the best of luck in his latest enterprise.

Shakespeare's fat knight- Sir John Falstaff

Falstaff Reviewing Recruits by Francis Hayman - a scene from 2 Henry IV

"I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men". [Sir John Falstaff, 2 Henry IV]

Was the fat knight the Shakespeare's supreme creation? For sure he was a hit with the playgoers at the time, and we can imagine their disappointment when he failed to appear is Henry V, despite being trailed to do so by the Epilogue in the second part of Henry IV:

"One word more, I beseech you. If you be not too much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine of France; where, for all I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat...."

What was the reason for this change of mind by Shakespeare? Certainly the actor that some believe was the first to interpret the role, Will Kemp, is known to have left the company around this time, in order to dance his way from London to Norwich. Was this the reason? Or did Shakespeare want to concentrate on the new king without the distraction of his larger than life knight? Whatever the reason, Falstaff does not appear, though does have an off-stage presence and does indeed 'die of a sweat'. As Hostess Quickly puts it in one of her charming quicklyisms: "He's in Arthur's bosom".


Falstaff was also popular with Queen Elizabeth, or at least such was the claim of one John Dennis, critic, playwright and unsuccessful adaptor of Shakespeare. In 1702 he recorded a tradition that The Merry Wives of Windsor, which features Sir John, was personally commissioned by the Queen. The story was enhanced in 1709 by Nicholas Rowe, the most successful playwright of his age and the first editor of Shakespeare, who added that Queen Elizabeth particularly wanted to see Falstaff in love. Whether or not this piece of hearsay has any truth to it we can, for certain, never know, though it does allude to the ceremonies of the Order of the Garter, to which Shakespeare's patron Lord Hundson, the Lord Chamberlain, was admitted at Windsor in 1597. The ceremonies were followed by a Garter Feast on St. George's Day, 23 April (Shakespeare's thirty-third birthday), which the Queen attended, so it is story in which there could indeed be a kernel of truth.


The fat knight first appeared in 1 Henry IV when he called Sir John Oldcastle. The historical Oldcastle (c. 1378-1417) was known as Lord Cobham and was executed for treason and heresy, though he was venerated as a Protestant martyr during Shakespeare's lifetime. The descendants of Oldcastle, the Cobhams, objected to seeing their ancestor portrayed on stage as a drunk, a liar, a braggard, a thief, a debaucher, a swindler, etc., etc., and the ever-obliging and diplomatic Shakespeare changed the name to Falstaff, a name based on that of the cowardly Sir John Fastolf of 1 Henry VI. 


With his merry humour, his grandiloquence, and his insistence on living life according to his own vision of it, the fat knight continues to delight audiences, and the more disgraceful he appears on stage, the more it seems we like him.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti & The Death of Lady Macbeth

The Death of Lady Macbeth by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (c. 1875)

'She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word'     [Macbeth 5.5.16]

Pen and ink and sepia wash drawing on paper of the death of Lady Macbeth from Macbeth, Shakespeare's intense study in the psychology of evil, as imagined by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood art movement. Macbeth's lady is depicted trying to rub the stains of Duncan's murder from her hands as she struggles with her repressed humanity.

John Everett Millais of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Ophelia by John Everett Millais

John Everett Millais (1829-1896) was one of the founders, along with William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and four friends, of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. 

The Brotherhood sought to revitalize British art with noble ideas and fidelity with nature, and Hunt and Rossetti prepared a list of 'Immortals forming our creed', wherein the 'first class' comprised Jesus and Shakespeare.

Many paintings from the Brotherhood explore tragic Shakespearean women. Rossetti painted The Death of Lady Macbeth (c1876), and the yearning Mariana (1868-1870) from Measure for Measure. Millais painted his Ophelia (1852) from Hamlet, depicting a scene which is only described in the play. And in 1849 he produced a scene from The Tempest entitled Ferdinand Lured by Ariel.

A statue of John Everett Millais is in place in front of the Tate Britain art gallery in London.

Ferdinand Lured by Ariel by John Everett Millais

Pioneers of Photography #2 - Henry Peach Robinson

The Lady of Shalott (1861)

In 1895 the journal The Photogram wrote of Henry Peach Robinson:

'Mr Robinson stands, as he has done for years, as probably the best known man in photography, and the one whose words and example have done more than those of any other man to create and encourage photographic workers'.

H.P. Robinson was born in 1830 and during his lifetime was one of the most successful commercial photographers in Great Britain. He encouraged photographers to create a 'pictorial effect' in their pictures, making use of the darkroom to combine negatives, as well as costuming and posing his subjects. In his own work he would carefully stage elaborate tableaux in picturesque settings, using relatives to  serve as models. An example of this technique is his picture titled The Lady of Shalott, which was made from three negatives. The image also bears an affinity with the Pre-Raphaelites, of which Robinson was a keen follower.


Sadly, the long hours spent in his darkroom, with the consequent exposure to harmful chemicals, had a detrimental effect of his health, to such an extent that he was forced to give up his studio at the comparatively young age of 34, and to devote his time to the theoretical side of photography. He thereafter wrote and published a number of reference books in which he continued to promote photography as an art form. He died in 1901.

Fading Away (1858)

Pioneers of Photography #1 - Peter Henry Emerson

Rowing Home the Schoof-Stuff (1886)

'Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience' [Peter Henry Emerson]

Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) was an early British photographer, raised in Cuba and the USA, then moving to England in 1869, where he spent the rest of his life. He continued his education in London and at university in Cambridge where he graduated with a degree in medicine and pursued a career as a surgeon. But in 1886 he abandoned medicine to become a full time photographer and writer.


His initial approach was to use photography as a tool to record precisely what the eye saw without enhancement or embellishment.[1] This put him at odds with the photography establishment, where the fashion was for combination printing, the technique of combining multiple photos to produce a single image. These opposing views were clearly unreconcilable, leaving each camp to go their separate ways.


Emerson's way was the rural English countryside. He took his camera to the rivers and broads of East Anglia, and in 1886 published his first collection of 40 platinum prints entitled Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads. More books followed as he created a fascinating portfolio of enchanting images of a world soon to be consumed into Mammon's bottomless abyss.


[1] He later changed his view and declared that photography was an art form and he would often take pictures out of focus. But a year later he again changed his view, now believing that photography was too mechanical ever to be considered an art.

In the Barley Harvest (1890)

Lone Lagoon (1895)