Tag: History

And… A memoir of my mother

Isabel Adonis is an artist and writer based in North Wales. I first got to know her work as an artist when The Weavers Factory gallery held an exhibition of her show Scraps, Patches and Rags in 2021. The works in the show explored meanings of ‘home’, a theme that is also a strand in And… A memoir of my mother. Here, Isabel reflects on her childhood and her mother’s place in it, alongside an examination of what ‘home’ meant to her mother. It’s a book about fragmentation and division, about how society tries to constrain individuality, and how the search for the true self is almost impossible.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 5

‘Cherry’ Ingram: The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossom’s

Have you visited Japan during the cherry blossom season? Have you done your own hanami (花見/はなみ) ritual, gazing at the ephemeral beauty of the sakura (桜/さくら) in the brief window the trees are in flower? I have. Did you know that a single variety of cherry tree, the Somei-yoshino, a cultivar from the end of the Edo period (1603-1868), became popular at the end of the Meiji era (1868-1912), was unofficially selected as Japan’s national tree at the start of the Taishō era (1912-1926), and became a political symbol in the Shōwa era (1926-1989)? Or that prior to industrialisation Japan had a greater variety of cherry trees that blossomed over a longer period? I didn’t. Naoko Abe told me about it in her whirlwind of a book about Collingwood ‘Cherry’ Ingram.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4

Looking for Luddites

Looking for Luddites grew out of author and illustrator John Hewitt’s student interest in the Pennine landscape in the 1970s. It gathers together fourteen sites associated with the Luddite uprisings in 1812, drawn by John in their 21st century contexts and presented with a brief history of their significance.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 11

Unburied: The true story of Hannah Beswick the Manchester Mummy

I borrowed Unburied from work, where I received it as an advance proof from the publisher for the Local Studies collection. The author, Hannah Priest, presents a weekly literature programme on her local community radio station in North Manchester and first featured the unusual story of Hannah Beswick in a Halloween Special back in 2015. From there, she developed a local history talk on Madame Beswick, which she delivered for a number of years until something in her attitude towards her subject changed and she decided to research who Hannah Beswick was more thoroughly. The result is this book.

It’s a serious piece of research, but not a weighty academic tome. It’s wonderfully approachable and entertaining, carrying with it the humour and candid expression of Hannah Priest’s original local history talk, and her infectious fascination with the subject.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 3

The Shortest History of Japan

It’s no secret that I love Japan. When an ARC of the forthcoming The Shortest History of Japan arrived from author Lesley Downer, I couldn’t say no.

Downer describes her book as a fun informative read, aimed at everyone who’s ever been interested in Japan and would love to know more about the history but is daunted by thick history books that are all dates and difficult names. The Shortest History of Japan is a very potted history, touching briefly on key points in Japan’s story. For me it was at times a bit too brief; just as I was hooked into an unfamiliar period in Japan’s ancient past, Downer skipped on to the next era. I wanted more, and now I need to find the more that will satisfy me. The book is a success, then, because it has tantalised me. And for anyone who isn’t prone to running down rabbit holes of additional information, it’s an excellent introduction to the complexity of Japan’s history.

Divided into chapters that cover pre- and ancient history, through successive imperial eras leading up to the turmoil that resulted in the Tokugawa Shogunate, then the Edo period, the fall of the Tokugawa and, over five chapters, the story of the restoration and succession of the modern imperial court from Meiji to Reiwa, the book condenses key qualities of and events in Japanese culture and history; a sort of highlights package.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 5

Verdigris

Like a Bryan Adams song, Verdigris takes place over a single summer; the summer of 1969. Unlike a Bryan Adams song, Verdigris squirms with horror and questions what makes reality. In that summer of ’69, the novel’s narrator Michelino is 13 and a half years old (the half year is important to him) and spending the holiday with his grandparents in Nasca, Italy. Neither grandparent takes an interest in the boy, and he is left to entertain himself. That entertainment doesn’t include buying a guitar and starting a band. Michelino is far too esoteric for that.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 6

The Red Queen

Margaret Drabble’s 2004 novel The Red Queen is inspired by the memoirs of Lady Hyegyeong, a Korean Crown Princess in the second half of the 18th century. In it, Drabble has constructed a fiction in which the ghost of Lady Hyegyeong possesses the mind of a British academic, Dr Babs Halliwell, in order to correct some misconceptions about her life and who she was as a person.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4

A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In

A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In starts with a cabinet meeting of the officials of the Empire of Greater Fallowfields. The Emperor himself is absent. Each cabinet member, the unnamed narrator aside, shares a name with a bird. It’s a novel that pokes fun at mankind’s ineptitude, at the ability of unqualified people holding high office to mess things up, at the randomness of the state and its functioning, and at the way humanity perceives progress as a threat when first encountered. I also read it as an allegory for the good and bad in feudalism, capitalism and Marxism.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 3

Flesh and Blood: A History of My Family in Seven Maladies

Flesh and Blood, Stephen McGann’s medical memoir of his family, is a book I was convinced that I had read, but I hadn’t. I’d read about it because of McGann’s work as a science communicator who has spoken at the Cambridge and Cheltenham Science Festivals, and bought it on Kindle where I promptly left it languishing in the digital doldrums.

McGann is from Liverpool, part of the troupe of acting brothers that includes Joe, Paul and Mark. The family traces its origins to Ireland, with an earlier generation emigrating to Liverpool in the mid-19th century as a result of the Great Famine. McGann appears in the tv show Call the Midwife, which I’ve never watched. His role as Dr Turner, alongside a childhood full of illness, sparked an interest in medical science, leading to him undertaking a Master’s degree in Science Communication. The introduction to the book is a wonderful combination of McGann’s artistic, actorly brain and his science brain. As an actor, his job is to tell stories by imagining himself into the character he is portraying, feeling his way into that character’s being. When he began researching his family history, he says he did the same, imagining what might fill the flesh and blood gaps in the documentary data to try to form an idea of a recognisable personality for each ancestor he will never truly know. For this book, he has married that storytelling with his academic interest in the relationship between health and society.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4