SEVERAL incidents in the latest instalment of Tony Benn‘s diaries sum up the special place that he has in the hearts of the British public.
It’s unlikely that the presence of any other former politician would stir delighted youngsters to launch into a spontaneous chant of their name. Nor, for that matter, would the sight of many coughing ex-MPs provoke a concerned letter from a stranger to their son.
Certainly not anyone in new Labour, whose actions repeatedly invoke the ire of the Labour loyalist former secretary of state within diary entries covering the years 2001 to 2007.
It provides a stark reminder of what a terrible six years they have been, spanning a period during which the world and the shape of British politics have entered an uncertain, dangerous new phase.
From war in Iraq and Afghanistan to increasing assaults on civil liberties at home under the guise of the war on terror, Benn’s diary entries conjure up a disturbing overview of the ongoing decline in British democracy and the Blair government‘s role in undermining international law as Washington’s representative in Europe. …
What’s more, despite his acceptance and engagements within Establishment circles, which have drawn criticism from left-wing purists, it’s clear that he considers himself to be firmly on the side of ordinary people, rather than inside the loop bowing and scraping.
It’s also interesting to read his excited thoughts on his son‘s promotions within the Blair government. Indeed, Benn‘s decision to end his Morning Star column came in the week that his son had been appointed to the Cabinet, a decision influenced, it seems, by fears of embarrassing Hilary.
But it’s difficult to begrudge the pride and loyalty that this particular father feels towards his son, especially when Benn senior remains equally loyal to the Labour left and trade union movement as a whole.
And, while he may be cutting down his gruelling schedule at the age of 82, Benn’s diary probably remains as full if not fuller than that of many serving MPs.
It is an unlikely partnership – the predatory New Zealand falcon and the endangered mohua – but they are thriving side by side.
The falcon, a species in gradual decline, and the mohua (yellowhead) are benefiting from a predator control programme in the Catlins River Walk area of the Catlins Forest Park in Southland.
Endangered birds of the world: here. Of the USA: here.
The creator of the Ordrupgaard collection, the Dane Wilhelm Hansen (1868-1936), was a farsighted man: he collected works by the French Impressionists and Danish Golden Age painters back in the days when they were much less well known and sought after. This autumn the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag will show a great many works from this unique collection. It will be the first time that these paintings by artists like Cézanne, Degas, Courbet, Købke and Hammershøi will be on collective view outside the walls of the country house where they normally hang. …
In 1892, Wilhelm Hansen bought his first painting at the age of 24. It marked the beginning of a lifelong passion for collection. Initially, he mainly bought works by contemporary Danish artists, without focusing on any particular movement. During Denmark’s ‘Golden Age’ of art, between 1820 and 1850, Danish painting flourished as never before. The Ordrupgaard collection is comprehensive, ranging from realistic scenes of city life by Christoffer Eckersberg to tranquil interiors by Vilhelm Hammershøi and romantic landscapes by Johan Lundbye.
Hansen’s love of French art dates from frequent working visits to Paris, where he spent as much time as possible in art galleries and museums. He became fascinated by the Barbizon School and the Impressionists (at that time still avant-garde) and bought his first Impressionist works – by Sisley, Pissarro, Monet and Renoir – in 1916. Whenever he returned to Paris, he purchased more paintings, and the Ordrupgaard collection grew impressively. By 1918 it was regarded as the most significant European collection of French 19th-century art outside France.
Ordrupgaard
The collection is named after the village of Ordrupgaard, which lies just outside Copenhagen, among parks and fine gardens.
Hansen was an insurance business magnate. In 1916-1918, during the first world war, impressionist and similar paintings were cheap in France. However, in 1922, economic crisis hit Hansen’s business and he had to sell half of his art collection.
The The Hague museum had added some French nineteenth century paintings from their own collection to this exhibition. Including one by Paul Signac, Cap Lombard, Cassis. The work by Courbet at this exhibition included a painting about the cliffs at Etretat.
This is a video from the municipal museum in The Hague. It says about itself:
15 September – 2 December 2007, Gemeentemuseum The Hague.
Unbelievably long trains, glittering gold and silver embroidery, pastel-coloured ball gowns with costly lace from the Belle Epoque… The exhibition Hague Court Fashions sheds a fascinating light on the court culture of a bygone era using items of clothing from the 18th to the 20th centuries.
Well … err … royal court … originally, The Hague is not a royal city.
It never officially became a city. In the Middle Ages, in theory the highest political power were the German emperors. These were far away though; in practice, power rested with the counts of Holland. They granted some villages privileges to become cities; as the counts might profit from increased economic activity in places with free citizens. However, in The Hague village, the counts themselves lived. They did not want to give the local residents the same rights; as a municipal council of free citizens might become a countervailing power to the counts’ power.
Not only The Hague never officially became a city. It originally did not have a royal court. It had the court of the counts of Holland. In the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, the county of Holland was absorbed, first by the dukes of Burgundy, later by the kings of Spain. Their representatives for Holland were called stadhouder (viceroy).
As Holland and other Dutch provinces revolted against the kings of Spain later in the sixteenth century, the country became a republic. There still were stadhouders: officials, no longer under the king of Spain, but under the representatives of the Dutch bourgeoisie (“regenten”).
The stadhouders, however much they would like to be, were not kings like elsewhere in Europe. They had the title of prince: because they were sovereign princes in the tiny statelet of Orange in France. They were not princes of the Netherlands.
Still, like the rulers of small principalities in Germany or Italy, the stadhouders tried to imitate royal courts, like in Versailles in France. Usually, the stadhouders had more money than those petty German, Italian, etc. princes, but less than the kings of France. The language at the The Hague court was French; or, rather, a strange mixture of French and Dutch, called ‘Hagois’.
After 1789, the French revolution ejected the Bourbon dynasty from the throne. The dynasty of the princes of Orange fled from advancing revolutionary French troops to England in 1795. After Napoleon’s military defeats in 1813 and 1815 had brought the French royals back, the powerful governments in Europe wanted a Europe wide counter-revolutionary restoration. Not only were the Orange dynasty brought back to The Hague. In 1815, they also got the title of king, which they did not have in the times of the Dutch republic.
This royal court tried to imitate bigger courts in big European capitals. As the exhibition in the The Hague museum shows, there were very complex dress and other etiquette rules. The extensive exhibition shows many aspects of especially dressing, especially female dresses. While the exhibit goes from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century (not many textile from before the eighteenth century survives. From the whole sixteenth century in the Netherlands, only one complete piece of clothing, a boy’s, survives. It is property of the municipal museum), there is an emphasis on the late 1800s. There is much information on the ladies in waiting of Queen Emma, baronesses Henriette van de Poll and Elise van Ittersum.
They used to travel around with thirteen ensembles of clothes in two big suitcases, as one might never know if a special occasion would turn up where one dress might be appropiate according to court rules, but another one might not. This at a time when many poor women in the Netherlands were asking themselves whether they had even one set of clothes warm enough to survive freezing winter days.
However, the glory of the expensive dresses at court turns out to be temporary. Many of the dresses could not possibly be shown at this exhibition on mannequins. Some of these were shown, laying in display cases, as time had done much damage especially to silk and especially to backsides. Also, many dresses which still could be shown on mannequins, had turned pale yellowish from their original white or pastel colours.
Not mentioned at this exhibition was the shock which the Dutch royal court suffered in November 1918. Pieter Jelles Troelstra, the Dutch Social Democrat leader, then proclaimed a revolution. To counter this, counter revolutionary paramilitary forces, the “Burgerwacht” were founded. To recruit for these forces, emphasis was on love for the monarchy (even among non socialists, love for the royal family was mostly stronger than for the capitalist economic order). One of the commanders of those Burgerwacht forces was Baron van Ittersum, a relative of royal lady in waiting, Baroness Elise van Ittersum.
Later, in 1922-1923, the first Dutch fascist party was founded by admirers of Mussolini: the Verbond van Actualisten, VVA. When, in July 1925, this party participated in the Dutch general election, its leading parliamentary candidate was Baron van Ittersum, a contact of other fascists who had been in the Burgerwacht under him.
The VVA got few votes then. Later, it was succeeded by other fascist parties, of which the most successful became the National Socialist Movement, NSB, of Anton Mussert. Like the VVA, the NSB originally was extremely pro monarchy. However, when Mussert’s German role model Adolf Hitler invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, and the royal family fled to England, the NSB suddenly dropped its monarchism.
The exhibition about Hague Court Fashions is extensive, showing clothes for dancing, for hunting, for travel, for high level mourning, for low level mourning, etc. etc. But it does not show enough background; some of which I have tried to provide here.
This video from the Senlis Council says about itself: ‘During bombings over Helmand, Afghanistan, 18 civilians were killed. The international forces claim there were no civilian deaths.
The Senlis Council is an international policy think tank with offices in Kabul, London, Paris, Brussels and Ottawa.’
Six U.S. troops were killed when insurgents ambushed their foot patrol in the high mountains of eastern Afghanistan, officials said Saturday. The attack, the most lethal against American forces this year, made 2007 the deadliest for U.S. troops in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion.
This is a video about Wilpattu National Park in Sri Lanka, with leopard etc.
From the Harvard University Gazette in the USA:
Fellow’s focus is foggy, froggy forest
Sri Lanka frog radiation provides food for thought
By Alvin Powell
Harvard News Office
In the dark of the Sri Lankan cloud forest, the researchers’ only guide was the headlamps they used to light up the night, illuminating the cold, gray mist that drifted through the trees.
They looked carefully as they walked among the trunks, the beams from their headlamps casting left and right, up and down. They examined rocks and branches, leaf litter and shrubs, tree trunks, and leaves high in the canopy. By and by, they found one, then another — small tree frogs that froze in the light and went suddenly silent.
The frogs are a bit of living scientific gold. With amphibians declining around the world in what experts fear is a mass extinction crisis, these recently discovered tree frogs are strangely abundant and incredibly varied, an overlooked yet amazing display of biological diversity in a part of the world where British and Sri Lankan naturalists had worked for a century.
For the next two years, Sri Lankan biologist Madhava Meegaskumbura will be working at the Harvard University Center for the Environment to understand more about these frogs, studying how they evolved, why they go extinct, and how to prevent that fate for those that still exist.
“Sri Lanka is on the front lines of the global biodiversity crisis,” said Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Museum of Comparative Zoology Director James Hanken, with whom Meegaskumbura is working. “It is among the hottest of global biodiversity hotspots, even though less than 5 percent of original forest cover remains. This is true for the island’s amphibians, and especially tree frogs, which have undergone a unique and explosive adaptive radiation numbering hundreds of species.”
Meegaskumbura, a Ziff Environmental Fellow at the Center for the Environment, is planning a trip back to Sri Lanka in December to further his work in the field, which has already astonished amphibian experts around the world.
In 2002, Meegaskumbura, together with other Sri Lankan scientists and researchers from Boston University, told the world what they found: as many as 100 new species of tree frogs in the high cloud forests and lowland rainforests of Sri Lanka. The new frog species, most belonging to the genus Philautus, were found in remnant forests in a part of the island nation that had been largely deforested by British colonial planters to make room for plantations of tea, rubber, and cinchona, a tree whose bark is used to make the malaria treatment quinine.
“I was just completely blown away,” said Boston University associate professor of biology and herpetologist Christopher Schneider. “I was completely stunned by the finding. It was clear that there was this enormous radiation of frogs in Sri Lanka that nobody had recognized. … I don’t know when the last such discovery was made.”
