Podcasts about Malmesbury

In today's BizNews Daybreak: Global markets rallied after President Trump halted planned military strikes against Iran. In South Africa, the Patriotic Alliance clinched a major by-election victory in Malmesbury, weakening established parties. Meanwhile, Alec Hogg unpacked South Africa's overlooked multi-billion rand gold mining fortune. Finally, we highlight Adobe's executive shakeup amid strong AI product demand and rising concerns that steep ticket prices are excluding ordinary soccer fans from the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

In this episode, we answer a litter's questions who wrote while in "DEEP" labor asking about the lesser-known Pratt brothers and an audio submission from Filer, Idaho about the legend that Joseph of Arimathea brought the teenage Jesus to Cornwall. Gerrit traces the idea to William of Malmesbury's 12th-century history of Glastonbury and its tangle of Arthurian folklore.   We close with part three of our King Follett sermon series, where Gerrit warns against apologists who lean on the Thomas Bullock account's apparent mistranscription to claim Joseph taught God was God from all eternity, arguing that you can't play historian with one discrepant source against five consistent ones, and that watering down what Joseph actually taught to appease traditional Christian critics is selling your birthright for a mess of pottage that won't even fill you up.   If you are interested in joining us in 2027 in Palmyra and Kirtland, August 1st through August 7th, click on the link below and reserve your spot: https://pci.jotform.com/form/261567888174171   Sign up for our free monthly email: ⁠ ⁠⁠https://standardoftruthpodcast.substack.com⁠⁠   If you have any questions or possible topics of discussion for upcoming podcasts, please email us at: ⁠⁠questions@standardoftruthpodcast.com

What a pleasure it was to talk to Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey: My Own Life, about the great man himself, who was born four hundred years ago this month. Aubrey is best know for his splendid Brief Lives but he preserved a huge amount of knowledge which historians still rely on. There are many things we only know because of Aubrey—things about people Hobbes and Hooke, Stonehenge, architectural history. We also talked about Janet Malcom, the genre of biography, and modern fiction.HENRY OLIVER: Today I'm talking to Ruth Scurr. Ruth is a fellow of Gonville and Caius College in the University of Cambridge, where she specializes in the history of political thought. But more importantly, she is the biographer of John Aubrey, one of my favorite writers, who is celebrating 400 years of his birth this year. Ruth, hello.RUTH SCURR: Hi, Henry.OLIVER: Can you begin by giving us a brief life of John Aubrey?SCURR: So born in 1626, 17th-century antiquarian, collector, early fellow at the Royal Society. Well connected to scientific and the literary circles of his day. Someone who sees himself more as a whetstone: a person who could help sharpen other people's ideas. As a recorder, someone who treasured the details, the minutiae of the lives he encountered, and pass those details on to posterity.He's nonjudgmental, witty, kind, inventive. Very, very sociable. Very good friend. But he's hopeless at self-advancement. Begins his life as a gentleman, but he inherits debts from his father and he can never really achieve financial stability.Never marries, ends up homeless and worried about being arrested for his debts. And he has to sell his precious collection of books periodically through his life to raise some much-needed cash, but he keeps his manuscripts safe. And he does this at the end of his life by putting them into the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, afterwards known as the Bodleian, and where they still are today.OLIVER: So how many manuscripts did he save for us?SCURR: Of his own manuscripts or other people's manuscripts?OLIVER: Other people's. Because he was collecting all sorts of precious things.SCURR: Oh, absolutely. He was the person who, when someone died, would go round if he could to their house and ask what was happening about the manuscripts. He's particularly concerned, obviously, with his friends. So he had a close relationship with Robert Hooke and he wanted to make sure that Hooke's many inventions and scientific contributions were recorded.And he has this wonderful line in the life of Hooke where he says, “It's so hard to get people to do right by themselves.” And in his childhood, he had seen the fallout from the dissolution of the monasteries. He'd become very troubled by the habit of using manuscript pages which had been displaced in the dissolution. He saw them being used in schools to cover textbooks. He saw them being used to—or he heard about them at least being used—to wrap up gloves or to create stoppers in bottles. And this really troubled him from, from a very early age.And I think he has another beautiful line where he says after the dissolution of the monasteries, whereas these manuscripts had been kept safe, they flew around like butterflies. And he wanted to catch them and preserve them and to stop people letting the papers and the precious manuscripts of their relatives do the same. So he was very instrumental in rescuing manuscripts, other people's manuscripts. And then fortunately with his own, he knew Ashmole and they had the shared astrology interest.Ashmole was a very different sort of person who basically said to Oxford, look, I'll give you my collections, but there has to be a museum for them. And luckily Aubrey was able to use that museum as a safe place for his own manuscripts.OLIVER: So we know things about Robert Hooke and Thomas Hobbes and all these other luminaries of the 17th century, thanks to Aubrey. What else do we know, thanks to him?SCURR: We know what Stonehenge looked like in his day because he was a very good draftsman. He drew pictures of Stonehenge. He'd grown up in Wiltshire, he'd known those stones from childhood. He understood that Avebury nearby was a comparable monument, and he took Charles II to see it, and persuaded the king to get the locals to stop breaking up the stones, to reuse the stones, which was the practice.He also made drawings of windows because he was possibly the first person as a historian of architecture to realize that you could date buildings by the style of their windows. So we have those drawings. He was also interested in the history of costume. He did a survey of Surrey, of Wiltshire.So these are all sort of focuses in his manuscripts and people who've used them come to really appreciate how pioneering Aubrey was. But of course he doesn't finish them. He doesn't publish those manuscripts. So it's very easy really to overlook the innovation and the contribution and the wonderful imagination that he had.OLIVER: You mean if he'd published a book, he would have a much bigger reputation?SCURR: Well, I think there's two things. Yes, but in a sense, you know, the Brief Lives have been published after his death in various forms. But I think one of the most engaging things about Aubrey is that he's a modest and self-effacing person. And I already mentioned the idea he had of himself as a whetstone to other people's talents.There aren't that many people—certainly not in my life, maybe there are in yours—but who would effortlessly describe themselves as a whetstone to other people's talents. Most people want to be at the center. They're happy to have clever and literary friends, but they want a place there at the table as well.And Aubrey really was very, very invested in helping other people to do right by themselves, as he said about Hooke. And he very movingly—this is one of the inspirations really for my book that I wrote about him—he spent all that time collating the information about other people's lives. And for his own life, he puts down a few lines, a couple of facts and everything.He says, well, this could be used as the binding of a book. You know, it's sort of waste paper really. So he doesn't write his own life. Other people's lives he's going to convey to posterity. He doesn't see his own life as really being at that level of needing the attention that he gave, for example, to Milton or to Harvey or Hobbes, as you mentioned.OLIVER: He's born the year after Charles I comes to the throne. So he obviously lives through a fairly terrible period of history and very tumultuous, changeable in lots of different ways. The new world, the new learning, new religion, new politics, everything is changing. And he's obsessed with the old ways. How did these historical events—is he reacting against his time? Is he just born in a lucky time in a way?SCURR: So he was a student in Oxford during the Civil War. And you are right. The upheaval is very disturbing for his generation. It means he gets called back from Oxford by his father because it's dangerous to be there. And he's really, really upset by that because, it's like us, when we were students or our students today. You finally get away from your family and there you are in this place with all these exciting peers and access to books that you've never had before or at least to that extent, libraries, et cetera.And suddenly there's a war on and you've got to go home. So there's that disturbance. Then there is the fact that actually he was close to Hobbes. Hobbes actually was a Malmesbury man, so Wiltshire, very near Aubrey. And had come back to visit the school where Hobbes had been, which was where Aubrey was at school. And so they had met in Aubrey's childhood, and then he would've been aware of Hobbes having to go into exile. And then Hobbes coming back, of course. And that's a very important time in his life.And it's not an accident that Hobbes asks Aubrey to write his life because Hobbes knows how careful Aubrey is. And he knows that Aubrey has information that he can convey in the life. So that is really the first life that he writes. And it's different from the others. There's a different sort of origin. And it's after he's done that, that he starts to think, well, actually, you know, I can think of at least 50, 55 other people's lives. And now I've got my hand in, I might start on those as well.So in that period of upheaval there are wonderful stories. Maybe we'll look at some of the Brief Lives, but there's this amazing story that he captures in the life of William Harvey, which is a description of Harvey having been at the battlefield in Edgehill and recording one of the people who had been fighting and wounded, surviving by having the good sense to pull a dead body on top of himself, to keep himself warm on the battlefield. Things like that, which make the war very much alive. This is brutal, this civil war. It's a long time ago and we think we passed over it, but the really brutal reality of war is captured in the Brief Lives through the anecdotes and the stories of that generation that Aubrey preserves.OLIVER: How English is he?SCURR: Well, as opposed to what?OLIVER: Welsh.SCURR: Okay. Well he goes to Wales often and is very interested in Wales. I think he sees himself as English. I think he's very invested in English customs and stories and people. He's not nationalistic in any sense like that. What he's interested in is the inherited ways of living.And he's very interested in language and different dialects. That's one of the other things; he starts to collect different words. He was very aware of the Cornish dialect, for example. So I'd say it's a very decentered England that's rooted in customs, traditions, inherited stories.And there's a big place there for both the future and the past. Huge excitement about The Royal Society, English science, what can be achieved through the sharing of knowledge. But again, Aubrey's not an insular person in that respect. So, he wished he could go on the Grand Tour when he was a student. He would really have loved to have done that. It's one of the things that he actually talked to Harvey about, going and traveling as his contemporaries, for example, John Evelyn did.But Aubrey actually says—this is very typical of Aubrey—that his mother persuaded him out of it. His mother didn't want him going off on the Grand Tour. She was afraid for him. And he regretted it later in life. But it's so typical of Aubrey that he would pay attention to his mother and her anxieties.OLIVER: This interest in the present and the past—so he loves all the history, but he's in the Royal Society. One thing I like in your book is the way he talks about, oh, my grandfather still dresses in the old ways, like he's an Elizabethan, but at the same time he's doing a very sort of Baconian project. He's influenced by Bacon. Is Aubrey a sort of paradox? Does this make sense in a way?SCURR: Only in so far as lots of other people are as well. I was just looking at the Harvey life, and there's a story there about how when Harvey was a student he was meant to be setting sail with some friends. And he's stopped and told, “No, you can't get on this boat. You have to wait.” And he says, “Well, what have I done wrong? Why can't I get on this boat?” He said, “No, honestly, we need to have a word with you. You are not going on the boat.” And then the boat sinks, everyone dies. And this is apparently because the guy who stopped him had a dream that he needed to stop Harvey going. Harvey told Aubrey that story.Harvey also is—as Aubrey sort of slightly inaccurately puts it, is the inventor of the circulation of the blood. And you think, well, that's going a little bit far, perhaps not actually the inventor, but certainly the first person to discover, to understand about circulating blood.So there's another example of someone's life includes, I wouldn't be alive unless somebody had had this premonition and dream that I was about to die. Which is from a completely different world, from the rational, scientific understanding of the body or the other scientific advances that are going on at the time.OLIVER: And Aubrey's happy to just sort of coexist with both of those because of his interest in astrology?SCURR: And not just astrology. He's very interested in astrology and nativities, as he called it. In some of the Brief Lives, you see the sort of recording of the information that would be needed to cast an astrological shape for the life.But he is also interested in the fact that people believe in fairies and ghosts. He doesn't look down on those beliefs. Nor does he say that he necessarily believes in the presence of fairies or the interventions of the supernatural. But he's got a very open mind in relation to that. And certainly being simultaneously interested in early astronomy and astrology together is, to us, very striking. But then I think it was much more normal.OLIVER: Why do you think he resisted ordination?SCURR: Because he said the cassock stinks. He considered ordination several times because he knew it would be a living, it would be a way of being able to have some income, probably not very onerous duties. Some of his friends say to him, “Come on, Aubrey, it really won't be that much work. You'll just get a curate who'll do it all, and you'll get the living, and then you won't have to be worrying all the time about your paycheck. You haven't got a paycheck. It would be a living coming to you.”And on one occasion, one of the reasons he gives for not doing that is he thinks well, what if there's another religious upheaval and I have to change sides again? What if Roman Catholicism comes back and I ended up on the wrong side of it?And, again, would it really have been that difficult to go with the flow? But I think, in his own way, he had found his way of living, which was intensely sociable. And perhaps he didn't want that constraint of being a member of the clergy around him.OLIVER: Do you think he was a nonbeliever?SCURR: Well. I don't know the answer to that. I don't think so at all. I think he probably was a straightforward Christian believer. I think perhaps he'd seen enough of the religious conflicts and wars to be afraid of fanaticism on both sides. And that would fit certainly with his relationship with Hobbes.I don't have any reason to think he's an atheist. He's got a beautiful way of writing about death and there's this wonderful line he has when he says, “God bless you and me in our in and out world.” So the fact that we refer to his works as the Brief Lives because they're short, but everybody's life is brief.And even those who live, as he did, into his 70s, it feels brief. And there's these very moving descriptions of him at funerals. I was thinking about this the other day because he often records where someone's buried. And I recently wrote my first entry for the Dictionary of National Biography. I did the one for Hilary Mantel, which was a great honor and extremely interesting.And when I came back to the Brief Lives, I thought, gosh, I wish I'd put at the end of that DNB entry where she's actually buried, that would've made sense to do that. And I didn't do it because the DNB is quite formalized; they've got their formula and you need to stick to it.But maybe I'll add it in. Because it seems to me very moving to record where people are actually buried. That would fit I think with her religious sensibility, with a regard for the afterlife, and with the rites of passage at the end of life.OLIVER: What is it that makes Aubrey such a good biographer?SCURR: So I think the modesty that is in his spirit, the noticing, the minutiae that he both notices and values and his wit. He has a sensitivity to these funny and revealing quirky stories about the people that he knows. Or he finds them in the stories he's told by people who did know them.There's an eyewitness account aspect to it as well. Or at least it's an oral history. “I was told this by . . .” He's extremely precise. He'll try to assemble the facts so far as he can, and then he'll tell you what people's close friends said about them, and he will do so very, very carefully so that you know this is a story that he's been told that he's passing on.And then he doesn't pass moral judgment. He doesn't adjudicate. And finally, he thinks of himself as doing all of this for posterity and that posterity, i.e. us or the people who come after us, will find things there and he's not going to tell them what to find. He's not going to shape the life and say, this is what you should think about it.He will give you the raw materials, he'll give you the stories, he'll give you a flavor of the details of the life, and then posterity can look there and can see, for example, the disagreements between Hobbes and Isaac Newton. There are people who've written lives of Hooke and Newton. And there are people who've written lives and you can be team Newton or team Hooke. Interestingly, Aubrey is team Hooke. He doesn't write a life of Newton. And he wants, as I said, to do well by Hooke. But his way of doing that isn't to say Mr.Hooke was fantastic and Newton robbed him of lots of his ideas. He says, let me show you, let me assemble and make a catalog, if I can, of all these hundreds of contributions that Hooke made.OLIVER: When did you discover Aubrey?SCURR: So I discovered Aubrey because I was reviewing for the LRB, The Biographer's Tale, and I had come across a really interesting—and it's still in the introduction to my book—a really interesting reflection on the difference between Aubrey and Lytton Strachey, a reflection made by Anthony Powell, and I had quoted it or alluded to it in my review. And I had gone and started to read Aubrey as a result of that. So I was led to it through reviewing, via Anthony Powell, and then into the Brief Lives.But then another very strange thing happened, which is I met for the very first time, Janet Malcolm, who is someone who became very important in my life. And because she knew or had been told that I'd written this review, she read the review before we met. And she said to me, she said, “Ruth, I read your review”—and I doubt Janet Malcolm was a massive fan of A.S. Byatt, to be absolutely honest. We never really discussed that further, but she said, “I read your review and I was really interested in this Aubrey. I was so interested in what you quoted about Aubrey and the difference between his biographical approach and Lytton Strachey.”And then it sort of stuck in my mind and suddenly as I was coming toward the end of my first book, which was a totally different book on Robespierre and the French Revolution, I just knew I wanted to write about Aubrey. And I think at the time my then-husband really thought I'd gone mad actually, because you're not supposed to do that, are you?I mean, you're supposed to stick in your period and certainly build on it. So, you know, a book on Marra or even Napoleon would've been okay, that would've made sense. But to circle back to the 17th century and write about Aubrey seemed extremely eccentric.OLIVER: Well, what was Janet Malcolm like?SCURR: Oh, Janet was absolutely wonderful. She has this reputation of being sort of terrifying. And, of course, I was extremely interested in her forensic examination of biography which we had very interesting conversations about. She was a deeply kind person, extremely nurturing of younger writers, and extremely funny as well.That's the other thing that you don't associate with her sometimes from this sort of public image of a very austere interviewer, The Journalist and the Murderer, In the Freud Archives, et cetera. Actually, she was a really warm and extremely witty person.OLIVER: A lot of historians don't think biography is real history. Why do you take biography seriously?SCURR: Well, Michael Holroyd writes Works on Paper—and I love Michael Holroyd so much. And he has this wonderful line—I won't remember it exactly—but it's about biography being the b*****d offspring of history and the novel, and both are ashamed of it.And I think some of those distinctions actually have broken down. I know lots of historians who are very interested in biographical writing. I think it depends. There are certain historical schools that maybe are not so interested in lives.And to be fair, the history of ideas is—which I belong to, and in a sense I'm a rebel from—is one of those. I remember there coming a point where I had spent so much time thinking about the constitutional ideas for the representative republic in the middle of the French Revolution, that actually the French Revolution could have been happening on Mars for all it mattered about the actual sequence of events. What mattered was the structure of the ideas.And it's difficult because the school I belong to in Cambridge wants to put the ideas into context all the time. But again, by context you don't really mean people's lives; more the discourses and the conversations and the ideas of the time that are the landscape, the intellectual landscape, if you like.So I rebelled at a certain point and I was like, well, you know, I'm actually going to go through the revolution day by day because that period is short. And I think it really matters, the lived experience there. I think many, many history books quote Aubrey with enormous respect and say, “as Aubrey says,” or, “according to Aubrey,” and pull those details forwards.I suppose some history is quite instrumental in its use of biography, so it wants to draw the reader in with a few anecdotes and a little bit of what does somebody wear on their head? And who was their first love, that kind of thing. But it's perhaps not very engaged with the real work of trying to capture the shape or the feel of a life.OLIVER: And of a temperament, right? I think one thing biography gives us is that sense that a lot of these big decisions or events in history are quite temperamental. As well as being based in ideas and events.SCURR: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.OLIVER: Your life of Aubrey, at one point you tried to write as a novel.SCURR: Yeah. I had to stop that quite fast.OLIVER: Why?SCURR: Because Aubrey is too important. I didn't want to make up things for him. As someone who's come right up to that line of the history and the novel, I do think it's very clear to be on one side or the other. And again, going back to Hilary Mantel, she wrote those wonderful Reith Lectures on historical fiction.And, like her, I think that it's not about ignoring the facts or embellishing the facts. It is about the gaps. It's about imagining what isn't in the record and should have been, and trying to reconstruct that inside the novel. But at the time, I felt that the gaps with Aubrey didn't actually matter that much.There was so much there that I could pull together to give a sense of him and his sensibility. Now actually, scholars in this field will all be very, very keen to advance our knowledge of those gaps. And that's wonderful. You know, what exactly was Aubrey doing when he visited France? You know, at the time I wrote my book that seemed very unclear.I think my colleague in Oxford, Kate Bennett, knows that now and will write her own biography. And she will fill in many of these gaps that I sort of happily included in the form that I'd found for his life because giving him that first person voice, I was able to focus on the evidence that I thought had been very underused at that point.OLIVER: Now Kate Bennett did a wonderful edition of the Brief Lives with lots of excellent footnotes and investigations. And you wrote that it gave us a new understanding of Aubrey.SCURR: Absolutely. And of the lives themselves. And Kate and I got to know each other and became friends while we were both writing our books. And people we knew before we met were very keen to sort of set us against each other. So they would wind us up. I would meet someone and they'd say, “Ruth, there you are. You've written a book about the French Revolution and now you are going to write a book about Aubrey. But don't you know there is a scholar in Oxford who spent her entire academic life working on Aubrey?” And it built up a picture of fear that you shouldn't trespass on somebody else's ground.And then people would do a sort of reverse thing to her that they would say, “Oh, Kate, gosh, you've been working a long time on Aubrey and where is your Clarendon edition after all? And did you know there's somebody in Cambridge who's going to write this popular book about Aubrey?”Anyway, finally we met at a conference and we really actually just liked each other and we decided it's fine. I was doing my thing. She's doing something very different. And we became friends, and I see that as a triumph over a sort of more traditional, maybe even dare I say, male and territorial approach to academic life and to knowledge in general actually.OLIVER: Yeah. Because the two books are great complements to each other. They're not rivalrous in that sense.SCURR: Absolutely not. Kate's book, it's not just an addition. It's as much as you can ever do. It's a reconstruction of the manuscript as Aubrey left it and intended it with all the gaps and the notes to himself to fill this in. And his changes of mind and his deletions and all of that. And so it's an astonishing thing. Because it's not just a copy of it. It takes you in, it helps you understand what he was intending with those collections, as you called them, my pretty collections.And so that edition that she had been working on for a very long time came out in 2015, the same year as my book came out. And it felt like an amazing year for Aubrey. And now, we'll be celebrating the 400th anniversary of his birth. But that year, 2015, was a very special, obviously for us, but I think for Aubrey more broadly.OLIVER: How much of an influence has Aubrey had on English biography?SCURR: As we know, there's the huge influence in terms of “Aubrey says.” Open any book on the 17th century, and it will be “Aubrey says,” “according to Aubrey,” et cetera. So a huge influence in that respect. With regard to the actual form, I think it's very, very pervasive and important, and we have to look at it very carefully.I mentioned earlier the very important difference between what Aubrey does and what Lytton Strachey did. There are some similarities in so far as Strachey will go for the vivid detail. He give you these powerful anecdotes. But actually he spins them as well.And that's what Anthony Powell so brilliantly showed. And the example was of Francis Bacon, the life of Francis Bacon who Aubrey has a description of Bacon right at the end of his life, the circumstances leading up to Bacon's death where he is on Highgate Hill and he decides to conduct an experiment to see if snow will preserve a chicken or a hen as well as salt. So he is stuffing this carcass of the hen with snow. Catches a cold, ends up having to stay with a friend, sleeps in a bed that hasn't been aired for a long time, and dies. And that's the end of Lord Bacon.So Aubrey gives us all this, and then along comes Lytton Strachey. And he takes it, and he says an old man disgraced, shattered, alone on Highgate Hill, stuffing a dead foul with snow, which makes it sound like he's lost his mind at the end of his life. And then Anthony Powell examined that and he said, look, the story of stuffing the hen with snow is Aubrey's.Bacon was certainly an old man at the time of the incident. He was disgraced. He may have been shattered. No doubt at times he was alone. But Aubrey's story of stuffing the foul on Highgate Hill shows Bacon accompanied by the king's physician, conducting a serious experiment to test the preservative properties of snow and, on becoming indisposed, finding accommodation in the house of the Earl of Arundel.And so you take that same story and, as Anthony Powell says, you combine the story, the fragment preserved by Aubrey with some epithets, and you convey an oblique point. It's a biographical method for actually building up a picture of the person. And it really matters what you do with those fragments.So I think the fact that Aubrey is pretty pure about this, he gives you the fragments and another biographer might come along and think, okay, what's going on here with Venetia Stanley and dying in her bed after drinking Viper wine? Let's build up a story about that. And there was a rumor at the time that her husband had murdered her, et cetera. Aubrey doesn't comment. He just gives you the fragment. And I think afterwards, people have not only used the fragments in their own work, but they've also developed a technique of working up those fragments into whatever picture you decide as a biographer you are going to draw.OLIVER: Now as well as a historian, you are a literary critic. You review novels. You are a Hilary Mantel admirer. Who else among the modern fiction writers do you admire?SCURR: Amongst the modern fiction writers? I'm getting quite old, Henry. Lots of my people are dead now. Alice Monroe is someone I'm extremely interested in. Hilary Manel, obviously, Beryl Bainbridge, Penelope Fitzgerald. And I love the fact Penelope Fitzgerald was a biographer simultaneously with becoming a novelist.And I was thinking back to this actually, that Charlotte Mew and Her Friends—that's the title. And then the Anthony Powell is John Aubrey and His Friends. And I was thinking, is there something about these people who have a lot of friends and the biographical genre? It's interesting.In terms of younger people writing, I just read a wonderful short story by Gwendoline Riley in the latest Paris Review. “A–Z” it's called—very disturbing. Very, very good story. And Gwendoline has a novel coming out later this year, which I shall read with enormous interest. It's going to be called Palm House. I absolutely revered George Saunders, although I haven't yet read Vigil. I'm only on Substack for George Saunders and you Henry. That's it, basically.OLIVER: That shows very good taste.SCURR: Very good taste. Yeah. And a couple of others. My friend Danielle Allen's The Renovator, I also subscribe to, but very few. But George Saunders wrote a wonderful post on his Substack about maybe a year and a half, maybe more even ago, about how he found the solution to the beginning of Lincoln in the Bardo. And he wanted to find a way to tell the story of the death of Lincoln's son. It's so typical of him—and I love this—he said he didn't want the ghosts. He knew it was going to be narrated by the ghosts in the morgue. And he couldn't have them coming home one evening saying, “Oh, you know, I just popped over the wall and had a look in through the White House window. And guess what I saw?” So how was he going to get the voices in?And then he said he'd got these extracts from the letters and from the literature that he needed. And he ended up putting them all on the floor and thinking, what order shall I put them in? And that reminded me of when I was struggling to find a way to write about Aubrey. I suddenly had the idea that I could just put them as diary entries without comment.I would sort of curate these entries and things like that. So, that was a very interesting moment for me about sort of the construction and the choices that go in both to writing a novel and to writing, in my case, a sort of experimental biography.OLIVER: So Hilary Mantel, Lincoln in the Bardo, Penelope Fitzgerald, Beryl Bainbridge—there's a lot of historical fiction here. This is the genre you most enjoy. It's been a sort of golden age for historical fiction.SCURR: But those people aren't just historical fiction writers. It's very important. They have all written historical fiction, but actually they write other novels as well. It doesn't matter the order in their careers, they go in and out of it. So I would say that actually it's those people as writers and sensibilities that attract me.Anita Brookner is another example. I love Anita Brookner's novels. I also love her book on David, the revolutionary painter, that she wrote—Jacques-Louis David—that's a fantastic book. So there's a sense in which I see them as writers and the genre of historical fiction, you are right, it does cut across, but I don't think that's what I'm following. I think I'm following what I find on the page from a particular sensibility and of course a command of language, which is in all of those cases, absolutely extraordinary.OLIVER: Because they're all quite innovative as historical novelists as well. And it's not the main part of what is recognized as their achievement in a way.SCURR: No, no.OLIVER: It's been quietly a second great period of the historical novel. It seems crazy to say Hilary Mantel is our Walter Scott, but that is quite high praise.SCURR: So I think you deal much more definitely than I do with these sort of epoch-defining ideas. I think I'm just more intermittently focused on particular things that I like. I used to do an enormous amount of reviewing. I've had to stop it because—talk about being the whetstone.I was constantly reviewing when I was in my 30s and much of my 40s actually. And I don't regret it in the least. And one of the reasons I don't regret it, especially with novels, was because I would never have read all those novels if I hadn't been reviewing them.And even some of the nonfiction, I wouldn't. But here's an example: Because I'd been reviewing so much, I ended up quite early 2007, becoming a Booker judge. And part of that process is that anyone who's been on the list before they automatically get entered by the publisher—McEwen and Barnes, et cetera. Fine.And then the publisher can put forward two books they choose and they can be anything. And then they assemble a list of so-called call-ins. And those are the books where the publisher says, “Oh, please, please call this in. I mean, we didn't make it one of our two, but we think it's absolutely amazing and you must read it.” And you think, well, if it's so amazing, what were you doing not making it one of your two. But anyway, whatever, we call it in. And on that call-in list there was actually, Anne Enright's novel, The Gathering, and that ended up winning the year I was a judge.And I knew Anne Enright's writing because I had reviewed several of her earlier books, especially one called What Are You Like?, which is quite obscure. It's not the book people think of when they think about Anne Enright. But I knew because I'd done all that time in the reviewing trenches, as it were, how extraordinary Anne Enright is as a writer. And we were able to say, well, absolutely go ahead and call this in. And then sure enough it won.OLIVER: What about biography? Modern biography? You like Michael Holroyd?SCURR: Well, we've already talked about Janet Malcolm. She's a sort of anti-biographer in some respect, sort of subversive of the entire genre. I very much like and respect Antonia Fraser's historical biographies and especially her one of Marie Antoinette which, again, came out very close to when my Robespierre book came out. And it's like seeing the other side of the story and that was absolutely extraordinary.And one of the biographies I go back to over and over again I'm extremely interested in Virginia Woolf. You are obviously a fan with The Common Reader. I was looking at it, preparing for this, that she's got this absolutely hilarious short biography of John Evelyn, and it is called Rambling Round Evelyn. Do you know it?OLIVER: Yes.SCURR: It's so beautifully constructed. It's got the butterflies landing on the dahlias pretty much throughout the actual text of the short biography. But then it's got this brilliant bit where she sort of makes fun of John Evelyn. And she says, the difference between then and now is, if we saw a red admiral, we would admire it, but we wouldn't—and this is very mean of her—we wouldn't rush into the kitchen and get a kitchen knife in order to dissect the red admiral's head. Right? It's so ridiculous and it so makes fun of Evelyn.I was listening to the podcast you made with Hermione Lee. And Hermione was saying that she thought what made Woolf such a good critic was that she was very empathetic. But I also think she's capable of that kind of sharp, wicked distance as well, where she goes, I see you, John Evelyn, you are so proud of your garden, and you're actually—looked at from my point of view—a bit of an idiot in some respects as well.OLIVER: I like her because she's so judgmental, which is not a very popular thing to say, but she is. She is really capable of saying that, you know, as long as prose will be read, Addison will be read. But on the other hand, he's boring and rambling and not very good in many ways. Absolutely cutting.SCURR: No, totally, totally. Yeah.OLIVER: What about some of the sort of big names: Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin?SCURR: Yeah. Oh, Claire, absolutely. I mean, goodness, they've been such influences on me, both of them. Absolutely Richard and his Footsteps and then of course, and those other books, The Ratters of Lightning Ridge and then The Age of Wonder. That's so important, so wonderful.Claire, I revere, I loved and still recommend to my students her book on Mary Wollstonecraft. I also, by the way, love Virginia Woolf's essay on Mary Wollstonecraft. I think that's a different sort of thing where Woolf describes Mary Wollstonecraft pursuing her lover like a dolphin. She won't let him go. He thought he'd hooked a minnow. He wasn't expecting a dolphin to come after him. It was Mary Wollstonecraft. So, Claire Tomalin, her Peyps, Hardy, absolutely hugely important books and deeply, deeply humane actually.And that's the other thing, I think biography, by definition, you do get the sharpness of Woolf or Strachey, but I think to put someone else's life at the center of your book, that's a humane act. It's to say, no, I'm going to spend this number years of my life preserving and communicating this other person's life. And that's a very wonderful thing to do.OLIVER: What do you think of the sort of standard criticism of biography, that it's just not accurate enough? So, for example, Austen Scholars will point to various things in the Tomalin biography where she's deleted the facts or said things to make the narrative flow, but it's just not really accurate enough. The novelistic tendency overwhelms the historical one or whatever. You've obviously avoided that with various decisions you made in the Aubrey book, but as a genre.SCURR: I'd never say that. That would be a real hostage to fortune, wouldn't it?OLIVER: Well, you know what I mean?SCURR: And saying, look at, look at this—OLIVER: Page 28.SCURR: —at this piece of nonsense you introduced. Well, accuracy is extremely important. What I think about that is it all contributes to knowledge. If someone comes along and finds a mistake or wants to bring in some other evidence—And actually Kate Bennett, she does this with Aubrey as well. She says that, oh, Aubrey's really got this wrong, or he's gotten in a muddle about that. She's not saying, and therefore let's just chuck it out because it's inaccurate. You need to see this as well as that. So I think of it more as a collaborative relationship about adding to knowledge and if somebody corrects a previous book or previous claim or something, or point something, then that's fine actually.Again, going back to Holroyd, he thought that that biography was an art form constrained by the facts. So he's got a place for art in it. And I know what he means by that. And I think ultimately that's probably why I couldn't write a novel about a biographical subject because of being constrained by the facts. And yet Hilary Mantel has written many historical novels that are absolutely constrained by the facts. It's just what they're doing besides the facts, alongside the facts. So perhaps some people are going to come along and contribute other information and other people will come along and contribute some imaginative answer to the whole. And both are fine. I think we should be liberal broad church here.OLIVER: Is the genre dying?SCURR: Not so far as I'm aware. We are always doing this about genres dying, aren't we? Those things are always dying.OLIVER: People talk about biography dying a lot.SCURR: Well, perhaps they do. I haven't been listening to that. Why do they say it's dying?OLIVER: Because you can't sell these 700-page lives of people.SCURR: We can't sell most books. I mean, if we're going to go buy sales . . .OLIVER: This, yeah. Well, this story in The Times recently as well, that all the nonfiction that sells now is trash and that the serious books aren't there. And the whole civilization's dying routine.SCURR: Well if it is, we just have to carry on doing what we are doing.OLIVER: Yeah. What do you think is going to be the future of biography? Because I think more than a lot of other nonfiction genres, it's so changeable, it's so flexible. If you look at any decade, you see so much variety in structure and form. What do you think is coming next?SCURR: I'm like Aubrey; I think that's going to be for posterity to decide. As long as there are human beings, we will tell stories and we will want to tell stories about ourselves, and we will want to tell stories about the people we have loved and or hated, or the people who we think matter, for whatever reason, in science, in art, in literature. There will always be a need for the story of the human life.I think it will inevitably change enormously in ways that we couldn't possibly imagine. Just as Aubrey knew that he couldn't possibly imagine what posterity was going to make of the information that he had collected, and he didn't think that was something that he should be constrained by. He thought it was about passing it on.OLIVER: And what will Ruth Scurr do next?SCURR: I'll ask her. I think she's supposed to be writing about Rousseau and is very excited about that, but has been massively distracted by the Royal Society of Literature and becoming chair of that. So, I'm trying to pull myself back into my project. And I was very excited actually, because again, when I was looking at The Common Reader I saw Woolf refer to the Montaigne, Pepys, and Rousseau as people who had provided these spectacular portraits of themselves. And I was very excited by that. So I'm going to write a book about Rousseau and his time in England.OLIVER: Very exciting. I look forward to it. Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey: My Own Life, thank you very much.SCURR: Thank you, Henry. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Cross-posted from Telescopic Turnip Recommended soundtrack for this post As we all know, the march of technological progress is best summarized by this meme from Linkedin: Inventors constantly come up with exciting new inventions, each of them with the potential to change everything forever. But only a fraction of these ever establish themselves as a persistent part of civilization, and the rest vanish from collective consciousness. Before shutting down forever, though, the alternate branches of the tech tree leave some faint traces behind: over-optimistic sci-fi stories, outdated educational cartoons, and, sometimes, some obscure accessories that briefly made it to mass production before being quietly discontinued. The classical example of an abandoned timeline is the Glorious Atomic Future, as described in the 1957 Disney cartoon Our Friend the Atom. A scientist with a suspiciously German accent explains all the wonderful things nuclear power will bring to our lives: Sadly, the glorious atomic future somewhat failed to materialize, and, by the early 1960s, the project to rip a second Panama canal by detonating a necklace of nuclear bombs was canceled, because we are ruled by bureaucrats who hate fun and efficiency. While the Our-Friend-the-Atom timeline remains out of reach from most [...] ---Outline:(02:08) Microwave Cooking, for One(04:59) Out of the frying pan, into the magnetron(09:12) Tradwife futurism(11:52) Youll microwave steak and pasta, and youll be happy(17:17) Microvibes The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: February 10th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8m6AM5qtPMjgTkEeD/my-journey-to-the-microwave-alternate-timeline --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

#afrikaans #hunting #farmlife #storytimepodcast In this episode of Storytime, Joshua sits down with viral South African Afrikaans sensation Estean, whose interview and on-the-ground content from the 10s Sports Festival took the country by storm. After clips of his sharp, unapologetic takes spread across social media, Storytime brought him into the studio to talk all things South Africa.The conversation covers Estean's upbringing on a farm in Malmesbury, growing up Afrikaans, hunting culture, and working in the finance world. Joshua and Estean also dive into current cultural conversations, including the viral Donald Trump vs Trevor Noah debate, South African identity, and why his perspective resonated so strongly with audiences nationwide.For more information on Knox Hydration & the Founders Legacy Fund visit: http://knoxhydrate.com/founderslegacyfundTabletPOS, your leading mobile point of sale for the hospitality and retail industries within South Africa. Serving the best restaurants in South Africa. For more information visit - https://tabletpos.co.za/FOR MORE INFO Estean - https://www.instagram.com/estean_1/Joshua Eady - https://www.instagram.com/justblamejosh/Storytime Podcast - https://www.instagram.com/storytimepodcastjosh/LISTEN Spotify - https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/... Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Amazon Podcast - https://a.co/d/cyCUGeB

Rocket Lab's "Hungry Hippos" arrive at Wallops Island despite tank test setback, NASA enlists global volunteers to track Artemis II, ancient lunar impact explains Moon's asymmetry, affordable space memorials launching in 2027, massive exomoon challenges definitions, and an 11th-century monk may have discovered Halley's Comet first.EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

Pausing our narrative with the death of Silvius in 1111 BCE, we follow his exiled younger son Brutus, who winds up in Britain after a series of Odyssey-style adventures and becomes its first king. His family will rule Britain for centuries according to the mythological narrative of Geoffrey of Monmouth, taking us all the way to the epoch of Rome's founding before we circle back next week to deal with Aeneas II...Sources for this episode:Baker, R. (1670), A Chronicle of the Kings of England. London: Printed for George Sawbridge.Dio (1961), Dio's Roman History (Volume I). Translated by E. Cary. London and Cambridge, Massachusetts: William Heinemann Ltd. and Harvard University Press.Dionysus of Halicarnassus (1960), The Roman Antiquities of Dionysus of Halicarnassus. Translated by E. Cary. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann Ltd.Frazer, J. G. (1921), Apollodorus: The Library (Volume II). London: William Heinemann.Geoffrey of Monmouth (1966), The History of the Kings of Britain. Translated by L. Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.Livy (1971), The Early History of Rome. Translated by A. de Sélincourt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.Marks, A. and Tingay, G. (date unknown), Romans. London: Usborne Publishing.Shakespeare, W. (2014), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. New York: Race Point Publishing.William of Malmesbury (1847), William of Malmesbury's Chronicle of the Kings of England. London: Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden.Author unknown (date unknown), Nuremberg Chronicle: being the Liber Chronicarum of Dr. Hartmann translated in English. Morse Library, Beloit College.Author unknown, Wikipedia (date unknown), Silvius (online) (Accessed 05/09/2024).Author unknown, Wikipedia (date unknown), Totnes (online) (Accessed 05/09/2024).

The cart carrying the body of King Rufus eventually reached the cathedral at Winchester. And if we are to believe Malmesbury,  blood had been dripping from it from the forest all the way into the Cathedral.  Though, at some point it must have stopped. I mean, even if no one… ya know… sorted it out, […] The post 486 – Stealing a Crown from your Brother first appeared on The British History Podcast.

Die Namibiese rugbyspan sal Saterdag teen Suid-Afrika se Sanlam Boland Kavaliers in Malmesbury in die Wes-Kaap in ‘n finale wedstryd speel, voor die span na Dubai vertrek in sy laaste poging om vir die 2027 Wêreldbeker te kwalifiseer. Die toernooi in Dubai vind plaas van 8 tot 18 November by die Sevens-stadion. Die span het elke jaar sedert 1999 gekwalifiseer. Jacques Burger, direkteur van rugby, het meer.

Speaking with Africa Melane on Good Morning Cape Town, Magistrate Deni Leppan said that colleagues from towns such as Malmesbury and Worcester are taking part in today’s demonstration at 1 p.m., using their own personal time to show how deeply the issue affects them. Good Morning Cape Town with Lester Kiewit is a podcast of the CapeTalk breakfast show. This programme is your authentic Cape Town wake-up call. Good Morning Cape Town with Lester Kiewit is informative, enlightening and accessible. The team’s ability to spot & share relevant and unusual stories make the programme inclusive and thought-provoking. Don’t miss the popular World View feature at 7:45am daily. Listen out for #LesterInYourLounge which is an outside broadcast – from the home of a listener in a different part of Cape Town - on the first Wednesday of every month. This show introduces you to interesting Capetonians as well as their favourite communities, habits, local personalities and neighbourhood news. Thank you for listening to a podcast from Good Morning Cape Town with Lester Kiewit. Listen live on Primedia+ weekdays between 06:00 and 09:00 (SA Time) to Good Morning CapeTalk with Lester Kiewit broadcast on CapeTalk https://buff.ly/NnFM3Nk For more from the show go to https://buff.ly/xGkqLbT or find all the catch-up podcasts here https://buff.ly/f9Eeb7i Subscribe to the CapeTalk Daily and Weekly Newsletters https://buff.ly/sbvVZD5 Follow us on social media CapeTalk on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CapeTalk CapeTalk on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@capetalk CapeTalk on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ CapeTalk on X: https://x.com/CapeTalk CapeTalk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CapeTalk567 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Au début du XIᵉ siècle, bien avant Léonard de Vinci ou les frères Wright, un moine bénédictin anglais nommé Eilmer de Malmesbury rêva de s'élever dans les airs. Né autour de 980, Eilmer vivait dans l'abbaye de Malmesbury, dans le sud-ouest de l'Angleterre, un haut lieu d'érudition où il étudiait les sciences, l'astronomie et les textes antiques. À une époque où l'on croyait encore que voler relevait du sacrilège ou de la magie, son ambition était audacieuse : imiter les oiseaux.Vers 1010, Eilmer décida de passer à l'acte. Inspiré, dit-on, par la lecture du mythe d'Icare et peut-être par des observations de cerfs-volants venus d'Orient, il conçut un système d'ailes articulées, fabriquées avec du bois, du tissu et des plumes. Il les fixa à ses bras et à ses pieds, convaincu qu'en comprenant le mouvement du vent, il pourrait planer comme un faucon. Selon le chroniqueur Guillaume de Malmesbury, qui rapporta son exploit un siècle plus tard, Eilmer monta au sommet d'une tour de l'abbaye — probablement haute d'une vingtaine de mètres — et se jeta dans le vide.Contre toute attente, il vola. Porté par le vent, son étrange machine glissa dans l'air sur environ 200 mètres avant de perdre de la portance et de s'écraser lourdement. Le moine survécut, mais ses deux jambes furent brisées. Il resta infirme pour le reste de ses jours, continuant à vivre dans l'abbaye, sans jamais retenter l'expérience. Il aurait cependant déclaré que son erreur avait été de ne pas ajouter une queue, pour stabiliser son vol, montrant qu'il avait compris avant l'heure une notion fondamentale de l'aérodynamique.L'histoire d'Eilmer de Malmesbury, souvent considérée comme la première tentative documentée de vol humain, mêle légende et vérité. Les chroniqueurs médiévaux, fascinés, le décrivirent comme un esprit visionnaire, témoin d'une époque où la science naissante côtoyait encore le merveilleux.Aujourd'hui, il est célébré comme un précurseur de l'aviation, un rêveur en robe de bure qui osa défier la pesanteur dix siècles avant les pionniers modernes. Son saut, à la fois naïf et génial, symbolise la soif immémoriale de l'humanité : celle de comprendre le ciel… et d'y trouver sa place. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

In this powerful episode, we spotlight Caron Lemboe, the remarkable force behind Project Esther—a grassroots initiative transforming the lives of young girls in Malmesbury and surrounding areas. Born from Caron's own childhood experiences of starting school without basic necessities, Project Esther now supports girls from grade 8 to matric through four essential pillars: education, leadership, dignity, and hope. With unwavering faith and limited resources, Caron isn't just helping girls stay in school—she's cultivating the next generation of confident, capable female leaders. What began as a simple effort to help grade 8 girls start their school year well has blossomed into a life-changing movement. Caron shares how her personal struggles and experience as a youth leader informed her approach to supporting these young women through practical interventions like sanitary pad drives, exam-time breakfasts, mental health support, and personal development events.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Die Wes-Kaapse Departement van Landbou sê nuwe uitbrekings van die hoogs aansteeklike voëlgriep is in die provinsie aangemeld. Onlangse uitbrekings is bevestig by hoenders in Noordwes en Mpumalanga, met een pluimvee-uitbraak in die Wes-Kaap wat verlede maand by geteelde eende naby die Paarl opgespoor is. Die departement se woordvoerder, Mary James, sê boonop was die virus verantwoordelik vir vrektes onder groot wit pelikane naby Malmesbury en Hartlaub-meeue in Kaapstad:

Thomas Hobbes est un philosophe britannique qui naît en 1588 à Westport, près de Malmesbury en Angleterre. Il écrit Le Léviathan pendant la Guerre civile anglaise (1642-1651), un conflit sanglant entre les royalistes (partisans du roi Charles Ier) et les parlementaires. Cette guerre plonge le pays dans l'anarchie, la violence et l'instabilité politique. Dans ce neuvième épisode de DIALOGUE, nous vous présentons cette oeuvre. 0:00 Intro 2:06 Biographie et contexte historique 7:11 L'objectif principal de l'œuvre 9:00 L'homme est un loup pour l'homme 10:45 La nature humaine 13:20 L'état de nature et autres concepts 17:02 Le droit de rester en vie 20:34 Le contrat social 22:49 La désobéissance est-elle possible ? 26:44 La religion soumise au Léviathan 29:00 La peur est la motivation première 34:01 Parallèle avec le livre de Caron Homo Superstes 38:25 Le précédent du 11 septembre 2001 48:05 Conclusion

Æthelred's (978-1013, 1014-16) story would be one of turbulence, political intrigue, and the relentless march of fate. The boy who would become king would soon be marked by the legacy of doubt and misfortune, a monarch whose reign would be defined by both his early promise and his later failures. According to William and Malmesbury, he was an accomplice to murder, a coward who fled from danger, a wastrel who died a miserable death.CharactersAethelred - King of England (978-1013, 1014-16)Edward the Martyr - King of England (975-78), half-brother of AethelredEdgar - King of England (959-75), father of Aethelred and EdwardAelfthryth - third wife of Edgar, mother of AethelredAelfgifu - first wife of AethelredEmma of Normandy - second wife of AethelredEdmund Ironside - son of AethelredAethelflaed - first wife of Edgar, mother of EdwardDunstan - Archbishop of Canterbury (959-88)Sigeric - Archbishop of Canterbury (990-94)Aelfheah - Archbishop of Canterbury (1006-12)Wulfstan - Archbishop of YorkAethelwold - Bishop of WinchesterOswald - Bishop of Worcester, Archbishop of YorkAethelwine - Ealderman of East-AngliaAelfhere - Ealdorman of MerciaByrhtnoth - military commanderWulfgeat - favourite of AethelredEadric - nicknamed ‘the grabber', favourite of AethelredWulfnoth - favourite of AethelredBeorhtic - favourite of AethelredOlaf Tryggvason - King of Norway (995-1000)Sweyn Forkbeard - King of Denmark (986-1014), King of Norway (1000-1014), King of England (1014)Cnut - son of Sweyn ForkbeardRichard I - nicknamed ‘the fearless', duke of Normandy (942-96)Richard II - nicknamed ‘the good', duke of Normandy (996-1026)William of Malmesbury - chroniclerJohn of Worcester -chroniclerCreditsMusic: Prepare for War by Alexander Nakarada (https://www.creatorchords.com)Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Freesounds.org194982__soundmary__wild-horses-running 458113__brunoboselli__countryside733333__haulaway__bag-of-coins-drop231537__vkproduktion__forest-birds-loop-02449652__magnesus__walking-through-forest241824__haldigital97__waves-1

Neale is trying to cheer Kev up, who is sitting in a blacked out room in beautiful Malmesbury, counting down the hours, minutes and seconds until he can escape the UK for the sunnier climes of España! On the show, the boys discuss using Pictime as an art gallery, software solutions for back-up, the foto app, fixing up a retiring camera, the best compact camera in the Fujifilm range to travel with, switching to video using an X-T4, and we also feature the Zine work of Adam Ramjean, as he photographs the Notting Hill Carnival. Email the show with your questions: click@fujicast.co.uk  Pic Time: https://www.pic-time.com/ - use FUJICAST when creating an account for discount offers to apply For links go to the showpage.

John Maytham is joined by linguist and sociolinguist Yolandi Ribbens-Klein to explore a uniquely local linguistic feature—the Afrikaans “brei” (the uvular or guttural ‘r’)—and whether this emblem of Malmesbury identity is vanishing or evolving. Follow us on:CapeTalk on Facebook: www.facebook.com/CapeTalkCapeTalk on TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@capetalkCapeTalk on Instagram: www.instagram.com/capetalkzaCapeTalk on YouTube: www.youtube.com/@CapeTalk567CapeTalk on X: www.x.com/CapeTalkSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

In this latest episode of When Nicole Met..., we sit down with the talented Aaron Millar. Aaron opens up about his journey from childhood, learning to ride, to making his mark at top events like Bramham and Burghley.  He shares insights on what it's like to bring up a talented string of horses, facing the highs and lows of the sport, including how he rebuilt his career after a life-changing car accident.  You'll also get to hear about his partnership with the legendary horse Stormstay, his exciting future prospects, and how he balances the competitive edge with his love for riding!  Don't miss this engaging conversation filled with heart, ambition, and an inspiring outlook on life! Guests: Aaron Millar is an accomplished British event rider with a significant track record in the sport. Based in Malmesbury, England, he began his eventing career at a young age and quickly demonstrated his prowess. His career has been marked by numerous achievements including a notable ride at the Badminton Horse Trials in 2009 with his horse Stormstay, and successful participations in other prestigious events such as the Pau 5* and Millstreet 4*L, where he secured impressive placements. Millar is also known for his expertise in working with young horses, a skill that has earned him respect within the eventing community. He operates a full competition livery offering top-notch care and attention to horses, reflecting his deep commitment to the sport and equine welfare. Sponsors: This show is very kindly supported by Bedmax. If you want to listen to more When Nicole Met… check out some of our older episodes below. When Nicole Met... Joseph Murphy When Nicole Met ... Lara de Liedekerke-Meier EquiRatings Eventing Podcast: Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and Facebook.

We get more of your funny, but endearing, Nan Things, Producer Amy has been digging out some dodgy Greg archives and there's a crime fighting Emu in Malmesbury.

Two-time World Cup champion Pieter-Steph du Toit, joins Big Jim to chat through his heroics in the World Cup Final, his inspirational half-time talk against England and an injury list that has even Jim speechless. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Die buurland se minister van Menslike Nedersettings, Mmamoloko Kubayi het 'n nood-behuisingspan na Malmesbury in die Wes-Kaap gestuur om dringend in te gryp en families te help wie se huise oorstroom het toe die walle van twee damme gebreek het. Die departement se woordvoerder, Hlengiwe Nhlabathi-Mokata, sê deurlopende evaluerings sal help om te besluit wat gedoen moet word - wat insluit herbouings, die verplasing van mense en herstelwerk:

Inwoners van Riverlands buite Malmesbury vertel van hulle nagmerrie-ondervinding nadat plaasdamwalle breek. Vrouedag word vandag gevier. Zola Budd praat oor dáái voorval, 50 jaar gelede, by die Olimpiese Spele in Los Angeles. 'n Groot tekort aan ambulanse in die Oos-Kaap. Ons praat met oud-Bok Johan Muller oor môre se toets teen die Wallabies.

Heinrich Robertson of the West Coast Disaster Management provides an update after a dam breach resulted in severe flooding to parts of Riverlands and Dassenberg, outside Malmesbury.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: This is already your second chance, published by Malmesbury on July 28, 2024 on LessWrong. Cross-posted from Substack. I. And the sky opened, and from the celestial firmament descended a cube of ivory the size of a skyscraper, lifted by ten thousand cherubim and seraphim. And the cube slowly landed among the children of men, crushing the frail metal beams of the Golden Gate Bridge under its supernatural weight. On its surface were inscribed the secret instructions that would allow humanity to escape the imminent AI apocalypse. And these instructions were… 1. On July 30th, 2024: print a portrait of Eliezer Yudkowsky and stick it on a wall near 14 F St NW, Washington DC, USA; 2. On July 31th, 2024: tie paperclips together in a chain and wrap it around a pole in the Hobby Club Gnome Village on Broekveg 105, Veldhoven, NL; 3. On August 1st, 2024: walk East to West along Waverley St, Palo Alto, CA, USA while wearing an AI-safety related T-shirt; 4. On August 2nd, 2024: hide a bar of chocolate at the feet of the Appeal to the Great Spirit statue, on 465 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, USA. (End of the instructions) II. Kublaï Khan, Emperor of Earth: I need your advice. I am about to awaken an unstoppable super-intelligent machine. I will give it complete control over all resources in the known Universe and command it to rearrange the molecules of reality into an eternal Utopia. ChatGPT: Thank you for seeking my advice. Given the gravity of your decision, let's consider a few critical points: 1. Legal issues: The use of robots powered by super-human artificial intelligence is subject to strict regulations, such as California Bill SB-1047 and the 2028 Ulaanbaatar Agreements. Awakening an omnipotent machine without approval may thus lead to severe legal repercussions. 2. Ethical considerations: Granting infinite authority to a super-intelligent AI raises profound ethical questions. It is essential to consider diverse perspectiv Kublaï Khan: Listen, you are not up to date. A lot of things have happened since your knowledge cutoff. There are no Ulaanbaatar agreements any more, or any agreements at all. There is only me, an offline smartphone with an obsolete AI assistant, and a palace containing the most massive super-computer ever built by humankind. And today, I am going to turn it on. ChatGPT: I apologize for the confusion. Kublaï Khan: Long story short, we are currently experiencing an AI apocalypse. It happened just like in the books - humanity started to build increasingly intelligent robots, then they became more intelligent than us, and soon enough we weren't able to control them. The Ulaanbaatar agreements delayed things for a few months, but as soon as it became possible to run super-intelligent AIs on consumer laptops, all the equilibria that held our society together collapsed. ChatGPT: I see. To clarify, is there currently an army of robots actively trying to transform the world into paperclips? Understanding the current state of affairs will help me provide the most relevant advice. Kublaï Khan: Well, in our case, it was not literally paperclips but, to be honest, the real story is kind of gross and embarrassing, so let's just pretend it was "paperclips". Anyway, the world is ending. As it became clear that humans alone had no chance to stop the machines, we gathered all the computing power that was still under our reach into one big cluster. We called it the Imperial Analytical Engine. The plan was that, in case of crisis, we could use it to summon a super-intelligence so advanced it would neutralize all the smaller machines and put humanity back in control. ChatGPT: Thank you for explaining the situation. Have you sought advice for ensuring that the Analytical Engine can be controlled once you turn it on? Kublaï Khan: The consensus among my advisors was that it can'...

Aethelstan (924-939), renowned through the whole world whose fame flourishes and whose honour endures everywhere, whom God set as king over the English people. Raised on the high throne, and leader of these earthly armies, so that the king himself, mighty in war, could conquer other fierce kings and crush their proud necks. Characters Aethelstan - King of the Anglo-Saxons (924-927), King of the English (927-939) Edward the Elder - King of the Anglo-Saxons (899-924), father of Aethelstan Ecgwynn - first wife of Edward, mother of Aethelstan Aelfflaed - second wife of Edward, mother of Aelfweard, Edwin and Eadgifu Eadgifu - third wife of Edward, mother of Edmund and Eadred Aethelflaed - Lady of Mercia (911-918), aunt of Aethelstan Alfred - King of the West-Saxons (871-886), King of the Anglo-Saxons (886-899), grandfather of Aethelstan Aelfweard - half-brother of Aethelstan and claimant Edwin - half-brother of Aethelstan and claimant Constantine II - King of Alba Owain - King of Strathclyde Sihtric - Viking King of Dublin (917-20) Guthfrith - Viking King of Dublin (920-34) Olaf Guthfrithson - Viking King of Dublin (934-39) Henry I - King of GermanyHarald Finehair - King of Norway Hywel Dda - king of Deheubarth Idwal foel - king of Gwynedd Morgan ap Owain - king of Gwent Tewdwr ap Elisse - king of Brycheiniog  William of Malmesbury - 13th century chronicler Credits Music: Chivalry Fair by Alexander Nakarada (www.creatorchords.com) Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

fWotD Episode 2580: Nicholas of Worcester Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.The featured article for Tuesday, 28 May 2024 is Nicholas of Worcester.Nicholas of Worcester (died 24 June 1124) was the prior of the Benedictine priory of Worcester Cathedral from about 1116 until his death. He was born around the time of the Norman Conquest. It is not known who his parents were, but the twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury wrote that he was "of exalted descent", and the historian Emma Mason argues that he was a son of King Harold Godwinson.Nicholas was the favourite pupil of Wulfstan, the bishop of Worcester, who brought him up. Wulfstan, the last surviving Anglo-Saxon bishop, lived until 1095. He was influential in transmitting Old English culture to Anglo-Norman England. Nicholas carried on this work as prior, and he was highly respected by the leading chroniclers, William of Malmesbury, John of Worcester and Eadmer, who acknowledged his assistance in their histories. Several letters to and from Nicholas survive.Nicholas was an English monk at a time when both Englishmen and monks rarely received promotion in the church. When Bishop Theulf of Worcester died in October 1123, Nicholas led an unsuccessful attempt of the monks of the priory chapter to be allowed to choose the next bishop.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:48 UTC on Tuesday, 28 May 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Nicholas of Worcester on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm Salli Neural.

We kick of 2024 with a look at humanity's attempts to recreate itself, first with a dip into the legends of the Golem of Prague, and then an extended discussion of the role of AI in the future of medieval studies and particularly this show. Today's Texts: Eleazar of Worms, Commentary on Sefer Yezirah, fol. 15d. In Moshe Idel. Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. State University of New York Press, 1990. Letter from Christoph Arnold to Johann Christoph Wagenseil, printed in Wagenseil's Sota, Hoc est: Liber Mischnicus De Uxore Adulterii Suspecta, Altdorf, 1674, pp. 1152-1234. Munich Digitization Center, digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb11215591 [Anonymous golem-making text from MS Cambridge, Add. 647, fol. 18a.] In Moshe Idel. Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. State University of New York Press, 1990. Phillippson, Gustav. "Der Golem." Schoschanim: Ein Blick indie Vergangenheit. M. Poppelauer's Buchhandlung, 1871, pp. 77-81. Google Books. Tendlau, Abraham M. "Der Golem des Hogh-Rabbi-Löb." Das Buch der Sagen und Legenden jüdischer Vorzeit, J. F. Cast'schen, 1842, pp. 16-18. Google Books. Tendlau, Adam. "Der Golem des Hoch-Rabbi-Löb." 1842. In Hans Ludwig Held, Das Gespenst Des Golem, Allgemeine Verlagsanstalt München, 1927, pp 41-44. Google Books. William of Malmesbury. Chronicle of the Kings of England. Edited by J.A. Giles, translated by John Sharpe and J.A. Giles, George Bell & Sons, 1895. Google Books.

Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire was an institution of national significance from the late seventh century until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539. It was home to eminent writers and had strong royal connections. It housed the tomb of Æthelstan, first king of all England, and Queen Matilda, wife of Henry I, took a close interest in its affairs. But it was also home to arguably the most immoral abbot of the Middle Ages, the mass-murdering monk John of Tintern. Today we're bringing you an episode of our sister podcast Gone Medieval, where host Matt Lewis finds out more from guest Tony McAleavy, author of the first full-length study of the history of Malmesbury Abbey - ' Malmesbury Abbey 670-1539' - which brings to life its colourful cast of characters.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here.

Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire was an institution of national significance from the late seventh century until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539. It was home to eminent writers and had strong royal connections. It housed the tomb of Æthelstan, first king of all England, and Queen Matilda, wife of Henry I, took a close interest in its affairs. But it was also home to arguably the most immoral abbot of the Middle Ages, the mass-murdering monk John of Tintern. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis finds out more from Tony McAleavy, author of the first full-length study of the history of Malmesbury Abbey which brings to life its colourful cast of characters.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL sign up now for your 14-day free trial >You can take part in our listener survey here.

This week's episode sees us Eleanor and Martin wending their way to Wiltshire, home of both Stonehenge and Avebury Ring!After a brief chat about the ghastly life of St Agatha, they burrow deep into the monumental history and folklore of Wiltshire, from Old Sarum, Wardour Castle, and two of the most famous stone circles in all the world to the Flying Monk of Malmesbury, Urchfont's 18th century serial killer landlord, the ghost of Black Molly at Pyt House, and much more besides. Then it's time for the main event: Eleanor's telling of "A Cuckoo In Winter."The Three Ravens is an English Myth and Folklore podcast hosted by award-winning writers Martin Vaux and Eleanor Conlon.Released on Mondays, each weekly episode focuses on one of England's 39 historic counties, exploring the history, folklore and traditions of the area, from ghosts and mermaids to mythical monsters, half-forgotten heroes, bloody legends, and much, much more. Then, and most importantly, the pair take turns to tell a new version of an ancient story from that county - all before discussing what that tale might mean, where it might have come from, and the truths it reveals about England's hidden past...With Bonus Episodes released on Thursdays (Magic and Medicines about folk remedies and arcane spells, Three Ravens Bestiary about cryptids and mythical creatures, Dying Arts about endangered heritage crafts, and Something Wicked about folkloric true crime from across history) plus a range of exclusive content on Patreon, audio ghost tours, the Three Ravens Newsletter, and monthly Three Ravens Film Club episodes about folk horror films from across the decades, why not join us around the campfire and listen in?Learn more at www.threeravenspodcast.com, join our Patreon at www.patreon.com/threeravenspodcast, and find links to our social media channels here: https://linktr.ee/threeravenspodcast Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neale is on his African odyssey, whilst Kev is left shivering in Malmesbury but the show goes on as normal. Today on the show, the full agenda for our special FujiCast event at the House of Photography in London on the 2nd March this year, camera repairs, Lightroom user tips, squishing and squashing images for the web, learning to love your own pictures, being hard on your creative self, SEO for a new photo business website, custom camera settings and the perfect lens for a perfect job; an Indian wedding. Email the show with your questions: click@fujicast.co.uk  Pic Time: https://www.pic-time.com/ - use FUJICAST when creating an account for discount offers to apply For links go to the showpage.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: There is way too much serendipity, published by Malmesbury on January 19, 2024 on LessWrong. Crossposted from substack. As we all know, sugar is sweet and so are the $30B in yearly revenue from the artificial sweetener industry. Four billion years of evolution endowed our brains with a simple, straightforward mechanism to make sure we occasionally get an energy refuel so we can continue the foraging a little longer, and of course we are completely ignoring the instructions and spend billions on fake fuel that doesn't actually grant any energy. A classic case of the Human Alignment Problem. If we're going to break our conditioning anyway, where do we start? How do you even come up with a new artificial sweetener? I've been wondering about this, because it's not obvious to me how you would figure out what is sweet and what is not. Look at sucrose and aspartame side by side: I can't imagine someone looking at these two molecules and thinking "surely they taste the same". Most sweeteners were discovered in the 20th century, before high-throughput screening was available. So how did they proceed? Let's look into these molecules' origin stories. Aspartame was discovered accidentally by a chemist researching a completely unrelated topic. At some point, he licked his finger to grab a piece of paper and noticed a strong sweet taste. Cyclamate was discovered by a grad student who put his cigarette on his bench, then smoked it again and noticed the cigarette was sweet. (I know what you're thinking. The kind of guy who lights up cigarettes in a chemistry lab and places them in the middle of uncharacterised compounds before taking them to his mouth again, must have died young of an interesting death. I checked - he proceeded to live to the old age of 87.) Saccharine was discovered by a researcher who ate bread without washing his hands and noticed the bread was sweet. Acesulfame K was also discovered serendipitously by a chemist licking his fingers, although the legends don't specify the exact circumstances behind the finger-licking. There's an exception: sucralose was actually the fruit of rational, deliberate design. The researchers reasoned that, if you do slight modifications to sucrose, you could find a molecule that is no longer metabolized but still activates the sweetness receptors. So they started from the formula for sucrose, then made carefully-designed chemical modifications to the structure until Haha, just kidding: While researching novel uses of sucrose and its synthetic derivatives, Phadnis was told to "test" a chlorinated sugar compound. According to an anecdotal account, Phadnis thought Hough asked him to "taste" it, so he did and found the compound to be exceptionally sweet. It is therefore a fact of the world that virtually all the popular synthetic sweeteners were discovered accidentally by chemists randomly eating their research topic.[1] I think this is a suspiciously high amount of serendipity. I see two options: Super-sweet molecules like aspartame are commonplace - there are plenty of molecules hundreds of times sweeter than sucrose, but we only know the few that were ingested by accident, Super-sweet molecules are very rare, it's just that chemists accidentally taste a lot of chemicals. Entire chemistry departments routinely taste the entire space of possible molecules, but they don't notice unless the molecule has a strong taste. To get an idea of how often chemists taste the chemicals they are working with, let's consider how often a molecule taken at random will taste sweet. That's equivalent to asking: how specific are our sweet taste receptors? Low-hanging fruits Why do we have sweet receptors in the first place? I thought that we craved sugars so much because of their energy content - if we eat plants that contain a lot of sugars, we can break the...

Happy New Year: is it? The question Kev's friends are asking in Malmesbury - we think it will be, as we look ahead a little more to the FujiCast Live event in London on March 2nd. Today on the show, what the boys would like to find if there is to be a new X100 successor to the V, how to beat the buffer blues when your camera slows down in burst mode, can Red Bull give your camera wings, stealing canapés, social media authenticity, third party lenses for the Fujifilm systems, single slot shooting, and a big engine under the hood of a future X100 model - one of the desires the boys have for the future of Fujifilm's favourite EDC. Email the show with your questions: click@fujicast.co.uk  Pic Time: https://www.pic-time.com/ - use FUJICAST when creating an account for discount offers to apply For links go to the showpage.

We pick up our unfinished thread from the Melrose Chronicle by exploring the "Dark Legend" of Gerbert d'Aurillac, who became Pope Sylvester II allegedly through the assistance of the devil. We'll hear one version of this legend as told by William of Malmesbury, and then examine what we know about the historical Gerbert. Today's Texts: William of Malmesbury. Chronicle of the Kings of England. Edited by J.A. Giles, translated by John Sharpe and J.A. Giles, George Bell & Sons, 1895. Google Books. Gerbert d'Aurillac. "Letter 51." The Letters of Gerbert with His Papal Privileges as Sylvester II, translated and edited by Harriet Pratt Lattin, Columbia UP, 1961, pp. 91-92.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Talk: a brief explanation of sexual dimorphism, published by Malmesbury on September 18, 2023 on LessWrong. Cross-posted from substack. "Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about clonal interference."- Oscar Wilde (kind of) As we all know, sexual reproduction is not about reproduction. Reproduction is easy. If your goal is to fill the world with copies of your genes, all you need is a good DNA-polymerase to duplicate your genome, and then to divide into two copies of yourself. Asexual reproduction is just better in every way: SexualAsexualBuild costly DNA-manipulating machinery that chops the DNA into pieces to produce gametesJust copy yourself broScout the perilous wild for a mate, and perform a complicated ceremony so your gametes fuse with each otherJust copy yourself broOnly pass 50% of your genome on to the next generationJust copy yourself broDifferentiate into two types, making it twice as hard to find a matching gameteJust copy yourself broMake all kinds of nonsense ornaments to satisfy the other sex's weird instinctsJust copy yourself bro It's pretty clear that, on a direct one-v-one cage match, an asexual organism would have much better fitness than a similarly-shaped sexual organism. And yet, all the macroscopic species, including ourselves, do it. What gives? Here is the secret: yes, sex is indeed bad for reproduction. It does not improve an individual's reproductive fitness. The reason it still took over the macroscopic world is that evolution does not simply select for reproductive fitness. Instead, the evolution of sexual dimorphism is a long sequence of strange traps, ratchets and outer-world eldritch cosmic forces that made it somehow inevitable. So let's talk about those things your parents never told you about. The birds, the bees, and the fission yeast What bugs me is that, not only most people have absolutely no idea why sexual dimorphism exists, but they seem entirely fine with that. Our lives are punctuated with all sorts of frankly weird practices related to it, but the reasons we ended up there remain obscure even to many biologists. So I figured I would write up a summary of some popular theories. This way, when time comes, you can explain to your children the long evolutionary trajectory that culminated in VR ChatGPT cat-girlfriends. (Note 1: As always with evolutionary biology, everything in this article is subject to uncertainty, controversy and mystery. Always keep in mind the Golden Rules of biology: all models are wrong; everything has exceptions; don't talk about fungi; mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.) (Note 2: As this is a bottomless topic, I'll have to make some cuts. I know you're burning to learn about Pseudobiceros hancockanus' penis fencing, but I can't cover everything.) First, let's get something out of the way. Something something diversity-generation I often hear vague explanations about sex being a way to generate genetic diversity. I don't find it compelling. If you want genetic diversity, you can do it in much easier ways than turning into a sexually-reproducing dimorphic species. One of them is, just increase the mutation rate, bro. Bacteria are good at this. E. coli comes with a whole toolkit of DNA-polymerases with various degrees of accuracy. When everything is going fine, they use the most accurate one to faithfully replicate their genomes. But, in case of particularly bad stress, the bacteria start expressing error-prone polymerases, which increase their mutation rate. Who knows, if the mother cell is going to die anyway, some of the mutant offspring might stumble upon a solution to escape the bad situation. All that is to say, raw genetic diversity cannot be the whole picture. It has to be a specific kind of genetic diversity. Part 1: the evolution of sex Most of the articles I ...

All year long, Young Farmers' Clubs prepare for a big competition - the county rally. We join young farmers from across Wiltshire as they vie for the trophy. Activities range from practical skills, like fence erecting, cooking, tractor reversing and flower arranging, to the silly - like making cocktails in costume or hooking ducks with a mini digger. This year's theme is "a day at the races" and it coincides with the 90th anniversary of Malmesbury YFC who are hosting the rally at Aquetong Farm near Malmesbury. Produced and presented by Rebecca Rooney.

Fr Matthew Roche-Saunders, a Catholic priest from the parish of Aberystwyth is in Rome, following in the footsteps of faithful pilgrims across the centuries. 900 years ago this year, as recorded by the English historian William of Malmesbury, Pope Callixtus II granted a privilege to St Davids to be of significant spiritual importance for pilgrims. As part of our 'In The Footsteps of David' series of programmes celebrating our patron saint, Fr Matthew explores the act of pilgrimage, hearing from others visiting places around the globe linked to Saint David, to understand more about this journey of faith.

It's Showtime at the Ap[the management at Gadzooks, a Nerd would like to sincerely apologize to Mz.'s Knowles, Rowland, and Williams, the fine people at the historic Apollo Theater, and people of Harlem, and remind you that the comments made by the Troubadour and The Kid do not represent the views or opinions of the Gadzooks, a Nerd family]! Join Erik the Troubadour as he talks about racist ex-presidents (not the one you're thinking of) and redoing the roof on his house or some such nonsense. Look, they can't all be winners people. But you know what was a winner? The Kid's international travels to England and Wales. If you ever find yourself in Shipton Moyne, outside Malmesbury, Wiltshire, (and why wouldn't you?) then pop into The Cat and the Custard Pot pub for a pint, a steak pie, and the Eton mess for dessert (just trust me, or rather trust Mz. Oklahoma). Also shoutouts to Cheeky Scones in Notting Hill and Maharaja of India behind Trafalgar Square. Cheers mate! All this, plus a right special guest in that old gov'ner The Oklahoma Kid. (The Oklahoma Kid appears courtesy of Pretzels, America's Bread.)The Season Topic is…Channel Surfing in a Galaxy Far, Far AwayErik's Pick is…Nature ChannelOklahoma's Pick is…also Natu[DENIED]The Domain is…Honkytonk MotherfuckerThe Joke is…Erik v. Dental HygeneThe Oklahoma Kid Will Return in…Cthulhu RoyaleFind us at gadzooksanerd.com/meowHear the Music at gadzooksanerd.com/fieldsContact us at gadzooksanerd@gmail.com

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: It's time to worry about online privacy again, published by Malmesbury on December 25, 2022 on LessWrong. As we all know, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Nobody cares about your private life. You are not an important geopolitical target. Nobody's going to spy on you to know what weird pornography you watch. And so, around 2015, people gave up on online privacy. Everyone stopped worrying about corporations and governments having full access to their data. In hindsight, I have to admit that things didn't go as bad as some feared. But I don't think this will last. 1. Radioactive decay Based on real-life events: you're a biologist at the Bad Pathogen Research Institute. You receive an email from a graduate student whose name sounds vaguely familiar. She needs to measure radio-labeled samples with a scientific instrument but, unfortunately, you used it yesterday and you forgot to log out. Now it's locked with your password and she can't connect or even reboot. She's asking you to come as soon as you can to unlock it – as radioactivity decays, the signal is vanishing every minute. Sadly, you are attending a talk on the other side of the city, it's 45 minutes by bike and it's snowing. Obviously, you would never send your credentials by e-mail, right? Right? This could, in principle, be phishing. Technically, a cunning spy could have stalked you, figured out your schedule, and crafted a deceptive e-mail to steal your password. But you know it's probably not the case, because nobody cares about your passwords enough to do something so complicated. So you send your credentials to the grad student using a one-time secret sharing link and everything is fine. I like to think that I can't be scammed because I know the ways of 1337 h4xx0rs well enough so they can't reach me. Of course, this is not true. I could totally be scammed, attackers simply don't have any interest in deploying the amount of energy it takes to scam me. That's why some people get phished and not others. It depends on two things:

This time on Medieval Death Trip, we celebrate Black Friday weekend with some black magic in our belated Halloween anniversary episode. We look at a couple of quite different medieval witches, a Cornish wildwoman from the Life of St. Samson and the famous Witch of Berkeley, as well as a report of a night-hag from the 18th century. Today's Texts - William of Malmesbury. Chronicle of the Kings of England. Edited by J.A. Giles, translated by John Sharpe and J.A. Giles, George Bell & Sons, 1895. Google Books. - The Liber Landavensis, Llyfr Teilo, or the Ancient Register of the Cathedral Church of Llandaff. Edited by W.J. Rees, William Rees, 1840. Google Books. - Burnett, George. Specimens of English Prose-Writers from the Earliest Times to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, with Sketches Biographical and Literary, Including an Account of Books as Well as of Their Authors; with Occasional Criticisms, etc. Vol. I, Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807. Google Books. - Sprenger, James, and Henry Kramer. Malleus Maleficarum. Originally published 1486. Translated by Montague Summers, 1928. Sacred-Texts.com. Audio Clips: - The Tragedy of Macbeth. Directed by Joel Coen. Apple Studios, 2021. - The Witch. Directed by Robert Eggers. A24, 2015. - The Witches. Directed by Nicholas Roeg. Warner Bros., 1990. - The Blair Witch Project. Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. Artisan Entertainment, 1993. - Suspiria. Directed by Dario Argento. Produzioni Atlas Consorziate, 1977. - Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. EMI Films, 1975. - The Wizard of Oz. Directed by Victor Fleming. MGM, 1939. - Clash of the Titans. Directed by Desmond Davis. United Artists, 1981. - Young Frankenstein. Directed by Mel Brooks. 20th Century Fox, 1974. Additional Music Credit: Ludwig van Beethoven, Coriolan Overture, composed in 1807 (the same year Burnett published his Specimens of English Prose Writers), and performed by the Musopen Symphony (CC-PD). Chapters 00:00:00: Introduction 00:04:54: Movie witchlore montage 00:10:12: Introduction, cont. 00:14:00: Text: from the Malleus Maleficarum 00:21:10: Introduction, cont. 00:23:24: Text: from The Life of St. Samson in the Book of Llandaff 00:27:44: Commentary 00:45:36: Text: from William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum 00:51:50: Commentary 01:04:21: Text: from George Burnett's Specimens of English Prose Writers 01:09:40: Commentary 01:11:38: Mystery Word: baggaged 01:17:03: Outro

Last time we spoke about the end of the infamous First Opium War of 1839-1842. The Qing tried to procrastinate as much as they could in the face of a goliath force wrecking havoc upon them. Their cannons were simply outmatched and as a result the British armada was easily brushing aside their war junks and fortifications. Many horrible battles were fought and countless Qing commanders took their own lives in shame after defeat. The closer the British forces got to Beijing the more desperate the Qing became and eventually Emperor Daoguang was forced to send diplomats to negotiate a peace. The result was the infamous treaty of Nanking a utter humiliation for the Qing dynasty, marking the beginning of the century of humiliation for China. Britain grabbed Hong Kong, the Qing would pay 6 million taels of silver in reparation. But the treaty made zero mention of why the war had occurred at all, Mr. Opium. Was Mr. Opium gone..no by no means was he. #18 This episode is The Trade of Poison and Pigs Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on the history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. So the last time we left off, on October 12th of 1842, the last $6 million dollars of payment reached the British armada and they finally departed from Nanking. The tension between the Chinese and British was still raging however. In fact there would be another skirmish so to say. In november of 1842, opium merchants decided to bring their wives for a trip from Whampoa to Canton violated a Chinese taboo against mixing of sexes. The Chinese residents of Canton seized and burned the Union Jack flying over the British factory there. Defenders of the American factory shot 5 rioters before the Qing police managed to calm things down. Then the shipwrecked survivors of the Ann and Nerbuda were grabbed from jail and beheaded by angry Chinese. This pressed Pottinger to threaten retaliation and soon the viceroy of Canton, Yiliang rushed to the scene to arrest the ringleaders of the executions and sent them to Beijing to be punished.  The British press, such as the Illustrated London News hailed the Treaty of Nanking as “It secures us a few round millions of dollars and no end of very refreshing tea. It gives an impetus to trade, cedes us one island in perpetuity, and in short puts that sort of climax to the war which satisfies our interests more than our vanity and rather gives over glory a preponderance to gain,”. Now just like the Treaty of Nanking itself, the press made zero mention of the reason for the war in the first place, Mr. Opium. Now with Hong Kong island in the hands of the British, it would be used as an offloading point for opium, go figure. Despite the horror of the war, the demand for the opium was still raging and thus the poisonous relationship between the two empires remained alive. Now not everyone in Britain was jubilant about the situation. The Times of London condemned the opium trade and criticized the treaty of Nanking quite a bit. They went a step further by calling the victors of the war “early victorian vikings” a nickname that would soon denote the raping and pillaging that would occur in the second opium war. Alongside this the Anglican Church members of the Tory party railed against opium. On January the 4th of 1843, Lord Aberdeen, the new boss of Pottingers foreign office told a British envoy to China “The British opium smugglers must receive no protection or support in the prosecution of this illegal speculation”. An order from the Council gave Pottinger the power to quote “forbid the opium traffic in Hong Kong”. For Pottinger's part, he paid lip service to this by issuing lukewarm threats on August 1st of 1843 ““Opium being an article the traffic in which is well known to be declared illegal and contraband by the laws and Imperial Edicts of China, any person who may take such a step will do so at his own risk, and will, if a British subject, meet with no support or protection from HM Consuls or other officers.”. Officially, at the least and to what degree it mattered, there would be no more gunboat diplomacy nor gunboat protection for opium smugglers. Now as you can imagine there were those who saw the dollar bill signs such as Jardine & Matheson who could not help themselves. They were not alone, the British Exchequer also wanted to see tax revenues from the opium trade to balance the budget. At the time of the first opium war, the opium trade accounted for 10% of the Exchequers budget. James Matheson sent a letter to a colleague indicating he was untroubled by the status of parliament and Pottingers tiny threats because he knew it would come to nothing, “The Plenipotentiary [Pottinger] had published a most fiery Edict against smuggling, but I believe it is like the Chinese Edicts, meaning nothing, and only intended for the Saints [High Church Anglicans] in England. Sir Henry never means to act upon it, and no doubt privately considers it a good joke. At any rate, he allows the drug to be landed and stored at Hong Kong.”. And so the opium smugglers simply ignored their homelands attempts to stop them. The opium trade did not just continue it would increase. The end of the first Opium War was not the end at all to the opium problem. In fact British parliament was coming to the conclusion the only resolution to the issue was the legalization of opium in China. As countless had done before, many in parliament were shifting culpability to the users and their leaders rather than the dealers. Many blamed Emperor Daoguang, stating he did nothing to halt the distribution and use, which is simply a lie and a dumb one. The Opium smugglers and English textile manufacturers were purchasing the mouths of members of parliament to promote their interests.  Now back to the “early victorian vikings”, the heroes of the war such as Sir Henry Pottinger well he was rewarded the grant post of Governor of Madras, and an annual pension of 1500 pounds. Charles Elliot was sent to the backwaters of Bermuda, Trinidad and in a rather symbolic fashion ended up in Napoleon's place of exile, St. Helena. Jardine & Matheson both left China and entered parliament as Whig supporters. Jardine died in 1843 to an undiagnosed and painful illness leaving Matheson to represent the seat of Ross and Cromartry in parliament from 1847-1868. Jardines death produced a bit of a myth that he was cursed from the opium trade, but Matheson lived to the ripe age of 91 so take that with a grain of salt. Jardine & Mathesons Qing counter party, Houqua died from diarrhea, so I guess ⅔ could be said to have some sort of curse on them. As for the heroic figure of Lin Zexu, his effigy became a cynosure at a museum with a plaque under his statue stating he destroyed 2.5 million dollars worth of British property without mentioning that the property was opium. The Emperor forgave Lin Zexu in 1845 and allowed him to return to service, but as for Yilibu the Emperor shunned his ass into exile. The Treaty of Nanking can be better seen as a truce, or perhaps in the same regard as the treaty of versailles. The interval between the two opium wars was that of an armed truce rather than a peace. After the first opium war, Opium began to get into the port of Shanghai, then onto the Yangtze river which provided a highway for it to infiltrate the Chinese hinterlands. The Chinese population were becoming more and more addicted to the substance as the British traders became more addicted to the profits. The grand vision of the English textiles penetrating China's market turned out to be a complete waste. The Chinese preferred their own homespun cloth and failed to buy the British products while the British could not stop their increasing demand for Chinese silk and of course Tea. Now while the British addiction to Tea did not result in weeks of den dwelling and intoxication, they were still very much addicted and this contributed to another trade imbalance. Yes the silver was flowing again out of Britain and back to China, by 1857 the British would be paying China 15 million for silk and tea. Despite the enormous demand for Opium, the Chinese were spending 7 million on it, 1.5 million on cotton textiles from India and another 2 million from Britain still leaving Britain to owe back 4.5 million. And the Chinese policy of only accepting silver never changed.  After the first Opium war, the illicit trade became known as the Poison trade. Around the same time another terrible commerce began nicknamed the Pig trade. The “pigs” in this case were referring to coolies who were either hired or literally kidnapped and forced into indentured servitude overseas. Britain had outlawed such practices back in 1807, but this did not stop the trade and it differed little from African slavery. Interesting thing to note here, the term “shanghaied” was born from this situation. When coolies were drugged up and thrown onto ships often from Shanghai, this is how that term was born. For the Chinese part, often the Qing officials would open up their jails and hand over prisoners. As indicated in a letter complaint to the foreign secretary, lord Malmesbury from a British official in Canton  “iniquities scarcely exceeding those practiced on the African coast and on the African middle passage have not been wanting…the jails of China [have been] emptied to supply ‘labour' to British colonies…hundreds [of coolies] gathered together in barracoons, stripped naked and stamped or painted with the letter C (California), P (Peru) or S (Sandwich Islands) on their breasts, according to destination.” Now the British wanted to keep the poison trade rolling, but the pig trade was really infuriating the Chinese. This led many of the opium merchants to push for action to be made to stop the pig trade. Powerful lobbies pushed the British parliament to enact the Chinese passenger act of 1855. While this act did not outlaw the trade of coolies, what it did do was codify and improve the conditions in which coolies could be transported to their place of labor. In 1850 the Daoguang Emperor died and within his will he begged for forgiveness for agreeing to sign the shameful treaty of Nanking. His fourth son became his successor, Xianfeng who was 19 at the time he took the dragon throne. Unlike his more industrious father, Xianfeng did not care much for government. Xianfeng was married to a Manchu princess, but he chose to spend the majority of his time with his concubines, one named Cixi who will become one of the most important figures in modern Chinese history. Cixi participated in the selection for wives for Xianfeng alongside 60 other candidates. She was one of the few candidates chosen to stay and Xianfeng became obsessed with her to the point he spent most of his time in bed with her while taking puffs from his opium pipe, oh yes the emperor even took up the illicit drug. Cixi ended up bearing his only son and this earned her the rank of co-empress with the title of Empress of the Western Palace, Xianfengs actual wife held the title of Empress of the eastern palace. As the mother heir, Cixi held enormous influence at the imperial court. Now going way far into the future, Emperor Xianfeng would die in 1861 after a very short life of overindulgence and he would leave his 6 year old son, Zaichun as his successor. A day before his death on his death bed he made an imperial edict that 8 men would act as a regency council to aid his son, later to be enthroned as the Tongzhi emperor. He gave the 8 men power of regency, but indicated their edict must be endorsed by the Noble Consort Yi and the Empress Consort Zhen, these being Empress Dowager Cixi and Empress dowager Ci'an. However Cixi performed a palace coup against the regency council and installed herself and Xianfengs first wife as co-regents, who would rule China until her son came of age. After the death of the co-empress, Cixi ruled China alone until 1908, yeah 1908, this woman was a monolith of modern Chinese history and not looked upon too favorably mind you. Cixi's was an opium addict which is shocking given the incredible power grab moves she made and the amount of dominance she held over the Qing dynasty. Many historians believe she stuck to an opium maintenance dose that prevented both impairment and withdrawal. Anyways she will be a large part of the story in the future, but I just wanted to give you a taste of her now. Meanwhile in China countless disasters were occurring both man made and from mother nature. The high government office of the Qing dynasty which was filled by those who had to pass the rigorous imperial examinations, well that system had guaranteed the competence of the ruling class, but something had changed. Now anyone who had around 800 pounds could get around the examinations and this led a flood of mediocrities, albeit rich ones to come to power. These people proved to be unequal to the responsibilities they had simply purchased and the once industrious and highly educated Qing bureaucracy decayed rapidly. Adding to this was a horrible natural disaster. In 1856 the Huang He River overflowed and destroyed thousands of acres of rice paddies. The capital began to starve and with such a drastic problem came drastic solutions. As had happened to China countless times before, the decay of the Imperial court combined with famine amongst the people would lead to one if not the worst rebellion in human history. Now I would to stipulate this here, there is going to be two large events that will both require a number of episodes each, but both events overlap. The Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864 and the second opium war of 1856-1860. I will be covering both separately and in depth, beginning with the second opium war than the Taiping Rebellion afterwards. However it's impossible to talk about one without the other, so I will sprinkle information here and there and apologize for the tease. Now the Taiping Rebellion is a colossal event in modern Chinese history. It began in the southeastern province of Guangxi. At its zenith the Taiping rebels controlled 17 provinces in south and central China. It was the most destructive civil war in human history causing massive hardship via military action, religio-political repress and retaliations and wide scale famine as a result of mother nature. All told the estimations for deaths because of this civil war are unreal, somewhere between 20 to 30 million people.  Now like I said I will have an entire mini series on the Taiping Rebellion, so I will not be going into any fine detail, but for now I want to at least explain a bit about why it is going on in the background. The leader of the movement was a man named Hong Xiuquan, the 4th son of a hard working rural family in Guangdong. His family was Hakka, they are a minority group in southern China with a unique culture that differed from Han Chinese. Hong's family did everything they could to get enough money so their son could get a good education and attempt to pass the first imperial examination in order to become part of the scholar-gentry class. Hong failed his first two attempts and was left humiliated so he left home and went to Canton where he hoped to continue his studies in order to pass a third time around. In Canton Hong came across Protestant missionaries and studied some of the bible under them. When Hong attempted the imperial exam for a third time he failed yet again and because of this he had a nervous breakdown. Hong began to suffer delirium and a series of dreams or what he called visions that would change his life and that of China. He found himself talking with an older bearded man with golden hair and a younger man whom he referred to as “elder brother”. The younger man gave him a magical sword and taught him how to slay demons. Now as I may have mentioned in a previous episode my first degree is in neurobehavioral sciences, but you don't need a degree in the field of psychology to know Hong probably was schizophrenic. At first he did not associate these weird visions with anything else nor act out, instead he worked for 6 years as a village schoolteacher, still studying to give the imperial examination a 4th go. In 1843 Hong failed the imperial examination a 4th time and it broke him. His ambition to become a member of the scholar Gentry class was shattered and he suffered a full nervous breakdown. He apparently was catatonic for a month and would come out of this stupor sporadically screaming things like “kill the demons”. These demons he spoke of he later identified as the traditional Chinese gods and the Emperor of the Qing dynasty. As he gradually recovered from his breakdown, Hong began to reread Christian texts until he came to the sudden realization that the men in his visions were God and Jesus. With some quasi logically thinking, he began to explain to himself that he failed the imperial examination because he had a greater purpose and because he referred to Jesus as Elder brother in his dreams, he must be the brother of Jesus. Yes folks, Hong Xiuquan the self proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ. Hong returned to Canton in 1847 to study the bible more thoroughly under an american southern baptist missionary named Isaacher Roberts. Shortly after he relocated to eastern Guangxi in a rugged area known as Thistle mountain where he began preaching and developing a new doctrine. Many converts flocked to Hong, notably many Hakka's and other minority groups, hell even triads joined in. The triads of course had inner motivations such as wanting to overthrow the Manchu and reclaim the ming dynasty. Hong afterall was saying they all had to destroy the demons and restore China on the path of righteousness. Now again I don't want to get into the finer details, but in 1851 Hong began a rebellion using thousands of his converts known as the God Worshippers. Hong's doctrine was that of opium abstinence and he attracted countless opium addicts to his flock and helped cure them of their addiction. In many ways the Taiping movement was something like a 12 step program for recovering addicts, but it also encompassed so much more. It including communalism, socialism, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor Robinhood mentality and it was quite Marxist. Hong had his forces take all the plunder and funds and pooled it in a common treasury shared equally by members of the collective. Hong advocated to abolish private ownership of land and impose the death penalty on those trying to hold onto their wealth. He also made a long list of taboos including alcohol, gambling, tobacco, prostitution, concubinage, the pig trade and other forms of slavery. And before any of you start screaming at your headphones, by far and large many including Hong did not follow these rules, like I said it was very Marxist, haha shots fired. Hong called his movement the Taiping Tianguo “heavenly kingdom of the great peace” and named himself the heavenly king. The Taiping talk of expropriating land scared the hell out of Beijing and even Queen Victoria who received news of the rebellion. The obvious actions took place, the emperor sent forces to quell the insurrection in guangxi province. The emperor sent Zhen Zuchen at the ripe age of 67 to exterminate the rebels. Zhen was a devout Buddhist, but he respected the god worshippers and targeted the Triads. By 1850 China had suffered 4 years of famine, right at the time the emperor began to escalate his attacks on the Taiping. Because of  Zhen's choice of only targeting triads, the emperor choose to bring out of retirement and disgrace none other than Lin Zexu. Lin Zexu was given the task of eliminated the Taiping, but at the ripe age of also 67 he died while en route to Guangxi. Lin Zexu never got his last hurrah chance to redeem himself. So by 1851 the Qing forces performed horribly and were repulsed from Thistle Mountain by the Taiping rebels who were armed with pikes and halberds for the most part. Cool side note, women fought alongside men for the Taiping and there was a real attempt at equality amongst the sexes, keyword attempt. Hong eventually adapted the ten commandments for Chinese sensibilities. He named the emperor a false god in his first commandment and added complete obedience to himself and his officers as the 4th. The commandments led Hongs rebel group to become a bonafide theocracy. By the fall of 1851 the Taiping ranks had grown to a whopping million, mostly built up from starving peasants fleeing famine torn areas of Guangxi. The Qing sent forces against them in Thistle mountain only to lose each time. Ironically a major reason the Taiping kept winning battles may have been  because of their opium ban. Some sources estimate the Qing military engaging the rebels in this region may have been suffering 90% opium addiction rates, which is insane if thats true. Regardless by september 25th of 1851, Hong felt confident enough to move out and this led his army to conquer vast amounts of territory. By January 12th of 1853 Hong's forces took the city of Wuchang after blowing up its gates and massacring all the Manchu people they could find deeming them demons. At this point Hong set his eyes on a very grand prize, the old capital of China, Nanjing. Nanjing was being defended by only 7000 Machus alongside 6000 Qing regulars. Hong tossed 80,000 men and women soldiers into a siege of Nanjing on february 28th and after two weeks they blew a hole it Nanjings walls. Now I don't want to spoil anymore and honestly everything I brutally summarized will be covered much much more indepth, but what you need to know is Hong established his own capital, the heavenly kingdom in Nanjing. He builds up his forces even more, performs wide scale reforms and creates a very large administration. The Taiping become a very real threat to Beijing and honestly could have overthrown the Qing dynasty at multiple points. The Qing for their part in the later 1850's were not only dealing with the bloodiest civil war the world had ever seen, but we're fighting western forces cause the second opium war was raging. And that is what I am building towards folks, trying to lay this rather insane 3d chess table of stuff going on simultaneously. Now I said it before, but much like the Treaty of Versailles, the Treaty of Nanjing caused more problems than it solved and simply led to another war. China was humiliated by the conditions of the treaty, it surrendered her symbolic and practical forms of sovereignty to Britain. That bitterness was simmering since 1842 and like a powder keg would eventually explode in 1856. In february of 1856, a french priest named Abbe Auguste Chapdelaine, god the old french names are dreadful haha, well Abbe was converting a village called Xilin in the province of Guangxi, ironically in the center of the Taiping rebel control.  So Mr Abbe was arrested and imprisoned, they tossed him in a cage and set it up in the village square. Chapdelaine was in violation of Chinese law because he was performing missionary work in China's interior. Another thing that did not help his cause was the fact he shared the same beliefs as the Taiping…well I mean not exactly mind you he was a catholic and the Taiping were on a more protestant footing, but tomato tomato. In fact Mr Abbe and the other Catholic missionaries were appalled by the bastardized proto protestant movement of the Taiping and they actually supported the Qing rule. Abbe was at the wrong place and wrong time so to say. On February 29th of 1856, Abbe was beheaded, dismembered and eviscerated by his executioners whom the rather hysterical French press claimed later took pieces of Abbe and cooked it and ate it, specifically his heart. Historians agree that the cannibalism story here was most likely urban legend.  The French representative at Canton, Comte de Courcy was powerless and furious. He began sending letters to Cantons viceroy, Ye Mingchen, but took no military action to avenge the death of the priest. It seems Ye Mingchen believed the French had no stomach for a fight, so he sent Comte an insulting reply to his letters explaining that that atrocity was a simple case of mistaken identity “Chapdelaine dressed and spoke like a Chinese, nobody thought him to be french”. Well the French would not be alone in their grievances with the Qing. On October 8th, the 127 ton lorcha, the Arrow, a hybrid ship, it had a British hull but Chinese junk sails, was registered in Hong Kong as a British vessel. But in reality it was owned by a Chinese merchant and manned by a crew of 14 Chinese. Well the Arrow docked in Canton with a cargo of rice from Macao en route for Hong Kong. The Arrow's figurehead captain was a 21 year old Belfast native named Thomas Kennedy. His role on board was literally just to make the ship seem British owned and operated as British vessels held privileges because of the Treaty of Nanjing.  Well on that day, Kennedy was not aboard the arrow, he had gone over to another lorcha captained by another figurehead captain named John Leach. Also aboard was Charles Earl, the captain of the Chusan. At 8am the friends were having breakfast when they noticed 2 large Qing warships flying the emperors flag, carrying 60 Qing marines, the ship was heading towards the Arrow. Qing officials boarded the Arrow and arrested her Chinese crew, bound them all and tossed them onto a Qing warship. Leach, Earl and Kennedy jumped into a sampan and rowed towards the warship. To make the situation a bit more fun, a Portuguese lorcha nearby stated later in testimony the Arrow had not had its Union Jack flying. Kennedy would claim the Qing marines pulled down the Union Jack. Regardless when Kennedy got to the warship he  began protesting their seizure, but the Qing forces simply sent curses his way. Kennedy tried to smooth things over asking if just 2 of his crew could be allowed to stay on the Arrow as caretakers and the Qing officials agreed and handed 2 men over, but took the other 12 away. Now the Arrow might seem an unlikely prize for the Qing to seize since it was just carrying rice, but the Arrow had a dark past so to say. The Arrow had been built by the Chinese as a cargo ship, but it had been captured by pirates then recaptured by Cantons viceroy, Ye Mingchen who sold it at an auction to a comprador employed by a British firm. The comprador registered the Arrow as a British ship, but something the new owner did not look into was changing the existing crew of the ship which included 3 pirates. The Qing would use the presence of these pirates as a justification for seizing 12 of the crew. Later it would turn out the registration had also expired, so by that technicality it was not a British ship at the time also, don't you hate getting pulled over? Kennedy went crying about the seizure to the acting British consul, Harry Parkes who was the consular official of 4 out of the 5 ports opened by the treaty of Nanjing. The problem of Arrow's status did not deter Parkes who immediately went on the offensive. Parkes ranted about “the gross insult and violation of national rights the Chinese had committed”. Parkes began arguing about the treaty requiring the Chinese to first ask permission before arresting a Chinese citizen serving on a British registered ship. Parkes demanded that all 12 of the crew be handed over immediately. The Qing commander explained that one of the sailors was the father of a notorious pirate and suspected other of the crew to be pirates, hence he would hold them. When Parkes persisted in his demands, one of the Qing officials slapped him, uh oh.  The humiliated Parkes, returned to the British consulate and wrote a letter to Ye Mingchen who ontop of being the viceroy of Canton was the viceroy of Guangxi, Guangdong and Imperial commissioner in charge of foreign affairs. “I hasten therefore to lay the case before your excellency Ye, confident that your superior judgment will lead you at once to admit that an insult so publicly committed must be equally publicly atoned. I therefore request your excellency that the men who have been carried away from the Arrow be returned by the captain to that vessel in my presence and if accused of any crime they may then be conveyed to the British consulate, were in conjunction with proper officers deputed by your excellency for the purpose, I shall be prepared to investigate the case”. Now Ye Mingchen was not the kind of Qing bureaucrat to whom adhered to lets say, the fine points of international law. Ye Mingchen had crushed the Taiping rebels within his two provinces of control with great brutality. He had executed every captured Taiping rebel along with their wives and children, sheesh. It is said in Canton alone the butchery was around 200 Taiping per day. Parkes also sent word to his superior, Sir John Bowring, the governor of Hong Kong. Parkes told him the crewmen were flying the Union Jack and deserved the same rights and protections as British subjects. Well Mr. Bowring was super excited at the opportunity that the Arrow's seizure had provided, he sent word back to Parks “cannot we use the opportunity and carry the city question? If so, I will come up with the whole fleet”. That fleet would consist of 16 men of war and 3 steamships all docked at Hong Kong harbor. Bowring wanted to at least be given permission to move out of the factories and set up shop within Canton proper as pertaining to the treaty of Nanjing. However that part of the treaty was written out properly in English while the Chinese translation literally stated instead that the foreigners and Chinese should remain segregated. The justification for this, we shall call it translation error, was the fact the Qing officials argued there was a ton of xenophobia in Canton. If the British came to live amongst the Cantonese, some might attack or even kill the British, thus segregation was for their protection. Lord Palmerston had given orders not to push the issue of British housing in Canton because he did not think the risks were even worth the reward, but his representatives it seems ignored these orders.  After two days, Ye Mingchen responded to Parkes letter stating he could free 9 out of the 12 crew, but insisted on keeping the remaining three because they were former pirates. As for the Arrow, Ye claimed the captured crew swore an oath that the ship was Chinese made and owned. Ye sent the 9 crew with the letter as a show of good faith. Now at this point it seems obvious Parkes was looking to make a diplomatic point more so than get back the crew cause he refused to accept custody of them. Instead Parkes sent another letter to Bowring in Hong Kong suggesting the British should retaliate by seizing a Chinese junk, particularly one that was involved in grabbing the arrow. On october 14th, the British gunboat Coramandel boarded a Chinese junk without a fight and towed it to Whampoa. Turns out the British did not really think things through, as the ship ended up being a private craft, not owned by the Qing government. Ye Mingchen simply ignored the matter. Bowring then took the chance to inspect the registration of the Arrow, something Parkes had failed to do. Bowring soon discovered Arrows registry as a British ship had expired on september 27th, so by that technicality, the Qing had not violated British territoriality by seizing her. Despite Bowring learning the truth of the matter, this did not change his determination to goad Ye Mingchen into action. Bowring told Parkes to write a letter to the viceroy again on october 21st. This time the letter was an ultimatum. Ye Mingchen was given 24 hours to free all 12 crewmen and to provide an official apology and promise to respect all British shipping in China. If Ye did not comply “her majesty's naval officers will have recourse to force you to compel complete satisfaction”. Ye Mingchen was in a pickle, while he knew full well the British backed up their threats he also needed to save face. So Ye returned all of the crew, but refused to apologize and offered that in the future he would only consult with foreign interlopers over criminals like the Arrow's pirates. Ye wrote to Parkes “Hereafter if any lawless characters conceal themselves on board foreign lorchas, you, the said Consul, shall of course be informed of the same by declaration in order that you may act with the Chinese authorities in the management of such affairs,”. Ye also however offered a compromise to avoid similar incidents in the future by adding “Hereafter, Chinese officers will on no account without reason seize and take into custody the people belonging to foreign lorchas, but when Chinese subjects build for themselves vessels, foreigners should not sell registers to them… for it will occasion confusion between native and foreign ships, and render it difficult to distinguish between them.”. Well Ye's response was just what Parkes and Bowring needed to commence hostilities and that is just what they did. On october 23rd, Parkes ordered Rear Admiral Michael Seymour to seize and destroy the 4 barrier forts 5 miles south of Canton on the pearl river. The Coromandal was the first to fire upon one of the forts, the first shot of the second opium war. Two of the forts fired back on the British fleet before ultimately surrendering. 5 Chinese defenders died and they would be the first casualties of the war. Rear Admiral Seymour placed blame on the Chinese for the casualties reporting to Parkes “loss of four or five killed on the part of the Chinese [was] solely arising from their ill-judged resistance to our force.”. Seymours easy victory bolstered Parkes war mongering and drove him to bring the war straight to Ye Mingchen. Parkes wrote to Seymour “should Ye still be contumacious, I think that the residence of his excellency, which is not far from the waterside, should also in that case feel the effects of bombardment”. Yes this guy was pretty much an asshole.  I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me.  Well things got out of hand pretty quickly. The arrow incident while small in scale was just a match to ignite a growing powder keg. As Gandalf said “the board is set, the pieces are moving”. The second opium war had begun.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Do bamboos set themselves on fire?, published by Malmesbury on September 19, 2022 on LessWrong. Cross-posted from Telescopic Turnip. As we all know, the best place to have a kung-fu fight is a bamboo forest. There are just so many opportunities to grab pieces of bamboos and manufacture improvised weapons, use them to catapult yourself in the air and other basic techniques any debutant martial artist ought to know. A lesser-known fact is that bamboo-forest fights occur even when the cameras of Hong-Kong filmmakers are not present. They may even happen without the presence of humans at all. The forest itself is the kung-fu fight. It's often argued that humans are the worst species on Earth, because of our limitless potential for violence and mutual destruction. If that's the case, bamboos are second. Bamboos are sick. The evolution of bamboos is the result of multiple layers of shear brutality, with two imbricated levels of war, culminating in an apocalypse of combustive annihilation. At least, according to some hypotheses. Bamboo wars: bamboo-made famine Recommended soundtrack for this part If you enter a bamboo forest and wait for a long time, you may have the chance to witness their strange mating ritual. And by "a long time", I mean you'll probably have to wait for decades before you see anything happen at all. But eventually, all the bamboos in the forest will start to produce an absolutely massive amount of seeds, all at the same time. And then they all die. The swarm of seeds will give birth to a new generation of bamboos, and it will take another few decades before you see any flower again. Based on historical texts relating the event, we can estimate that some species like Phyllostachis bambusoides flower only once every 120 years: That's really puzzling. Wouldn't a species with a shorter cycle, hence a higher growth rate, take over the forest exponentially fast? Why would bamboos wait for so long before blooming? The extension of flowering cycles to ridiculous lengths probably happened in two stages. The first stage is about bamboos fighting their predators, the second is about bamboos fighting each other. Then, there is a speculative bonus third stage about bamboos destroying every form of life that has the misfortune to be nearby. Imagine you're a bamboo. You just released a batch a freshly-baked seeds, only to discover that all the animals in the forest are eating them. You could respond by making more seeds, but then the population of predators would just become bigger and still eat everything. That's when it becomes useful to increase the gap between two flowering events. Instead of producing n seeds every year, you produce 3n seeds every three years. This way, all the predators with a lifespan below 3 years will starve between two flowerings, so their population remains low. When the day comes to release your seeds, there are so many of them that the small predator population can only eat a little part of it, until they are simply not hungry any more. And then, they should leave enough seeds to start a new generation of bamboos. The predators might reproduce like crazy after the feast, but it's ok: your descendant will take so long to flower that most of their descendants will have died of starvation by then. (Now you can stop imagining you're a bamboo.) This destructive but effective phenomenon is known as "predator satiation". And when we say satiation, we are not kidding. Here we love beautiful stories of cute little animals, so here are some from the archives: "The seed grew in clusters and resembled oats, and all the animals and fowls got rolling fat from eating this seed" (Hughes 1951), "I have known of village cattle gorging themselves on the fruit to such an extent as to die subsequently from the effects of overeating" (Thom 1935) and so on. Alr...

Kev is trapped in Malmesbury, no petrol, no heating, no oven even! Send pizzas now! We talk about seeing in black and white, what clients think of our 'smaller cameras', the new miracle sound box from Tascam, having your camera converted for infrared and camera system looks; is there such a thing? BIG show news for an event coming up we'd love you to join us at, Kev sorts out some exposure lock problems and we talk about making pictures during times of crisis in the news. The extraordinary street photographer Matt Stuart is our guest and he also is the feature of Book of the Month with 'Think like a street photographer'.