Karl May is tracking me down

  I’ve mentioned this phenomenon before: you become aware of a subject and suddenly you are stumbling across it with some regularity. It happened to me with Erasmus Darwin. It happened to me with the Sand Creek Massacre. It happened to me with Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus school. Eventually I give in and do…

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1821: A Year in Review

As far as my mental timeline is concerned, 1821 means the beginning of the Greek War of Independence, which I first became aware of thanks to Lord Byron, the baddest of all the bad boys of Romantic poetry. (This does not make me unique. Byron also introduced many of his European contemporaries to Greek aspirations…

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