From the 1930s milk bars provided a rare insight into Australia’s social history. Beloved by Australians, they are often feted in its literature.
For the Love of a Milk Bar
Author: Jo Wing
The Lost Carving, David Esterly, St James’s Church Piccadilly, London
Master woodcarver David Esterly reflects here on the series of events that appear to be set in motion for a life to change its course.
Fate is in the before and after. Before the bolt strikes, something charges the atmosphere, some long foreground of decisions and actions. And the sudden flash doesn’t always light up a clear path forward. But if you read the portents right and set your trajectory accordingly, fate and desire seem to come together, life swerves, and what happens after looks like what was always meant to happen.
Finding the Words and the Bards
Language is something that most of us take for granted. Yet when a language dies, many secrets of a culture die with it. Its wisdom, spirit and plant lore, its orally told history and stories, all can disappear within a few generations. Also lost is a distinctive way of being. Cornish (Kernewek), one of the… Read more »
Gilded Age, Edith Wharton, New York
On a cold January evening in 1879 Edith Newbold Jones entered the ballroom of the Fifth Avenue home of Mrs Levi Morton for her debut, having already written blank verse dramas, lyric poems, short stories, a novel and a published translation of a German poem (for which she had received fifty dollars). She was expected… Read more »
A Sweet Madness, Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, The Wheatsheaf, London
Dylan Thomas’s unfinished novel Adventures in the Skin Trade is a comic, slightly nightmarish evocation of a wild, alcohol sodden London, a London that he knew extremely well. It charts the time-honoured arrival of a rebellious provincial boy in the great city of ‘capital punishment’. Dylan’s alter-ego, a young man named Samuel Bennet, eagerly anticipates… Read more »
The Society Failures, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, London
In a letter to Emma Vaughan on 8 August 1901 Virginia Stephen (later Woolf) wrote: Our London season about which you ask, was of the dullest description. I only went to three dances – and I think nothing else. But the truth of it is, as we frequently tell each other, we are failures. Really,… Read more »
The Fitzrovians, Fitzroy Tavern, London
In 1919 Judah Kleinfeld, a former Saville Row tailor, took over a rundown pub called The Hundred Marks on the corner of Charlotte and Windmill Streets, in what was then known as North Soho. He renovated and reopened it as the Fitzroy Tavern and it soon became the hub of London’s bohemian life between the… Read more »
Bright Star, John Keats, Thomas Hardy
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
Going to the Chapel, Daphne du Maurier, Fowey, Cornwall
Whatever happens, I want to remember that I am doing this with my eyes open, and because I want a fuller life, greater knowledge, and understanding. So adieu…Daphne du Maurier.
Atmosphere is a Human Thing, The French House, Soho
In a letter to her mother and brother on February 11, 1960, Sylvia Plath wrote: Dearest Mother and Warren, A little middle-of-the-week letter to pass on some very pleasant news: picture (yesterday) your daughter/sister, resplendent in black wool suit, black cashmere coat, fawn kidskin gloves from Paris (Olwyn’s Christmas present) and matching calfskin bag (from… Read more »