Good morning. “Of all the events in the history of British Isles from the Conquest to the present day perhaps none is quite so important to understand as the Reformation and, with that, to understand one of its main and more immediate offspring and consequences, the English civil wars. Their legacy is everywhere, as was outlined in one of the best history books of the last 20 years, Blair Worden’s Roundhead Reputations. Some of the fundamental divisions in our society, not necessarily between Labour and Conservatives, but of attitude and broader questions of ideology, can be traced back to them. Our forebears, even 250 years after the events, had a better understanding of these things than we do. When, in the late 1890s, it was decided to put up a statue to Oliver Cromwell outside parliament, there were such fierce objections to the state paying for it that Lord Rosebery — who as prime minister had been one of the progenitors of the idea, but who was by this stage no longer in office — paid for it out of his own considerably well-lined pockets. It was strangely appropriate that he did, because the Primrose family coffers had been boosted by his marriage to a Rothschild; and it was one of the Lord Protector’s more enlightened policies, in 1656, to re-admit the Jews to England, whence they had been expelled more than 300 years earlier.” Simon Heffer writes about the legacy of Oliver Cromwell.

Laura Freeman writes about the art of hermits: “I have set Antonello da Messina’s Saint Jerome in His Study (c.1475) as my desktop background. Jerome, one of the four fathers of the western church, the scholar who translated the Old and New Testaments into Latin, sits at his desk. Formerly a penitent in the desert, where he removed a thorn from a lion’s paw, we meet Jerome now serenely retired to a spacious cell in Bethlehem. If you have half an hour to spare — who doesn’t? — have a go at zooming over the picture on the National Gallery website. Every tile and symbol of this sublime puzzle-box painting is revealed: the peacock, which stands for celestial paradise; the cat waiting like the devil to entrap men’s souls; the partridge thought to be so fertile she could conceive, immaculate, by a whisper or a breath of wind. Through the window on the left we see the pull of worldly existence: pleasure boats, a distant city, riders and riverbank walkers. Through the window on the right, above a restless ragtail lion, is the cleansing desert. In the clerestory, birds fly from ledges. As Jerome wrote, quoting Psalm 124: ‘Our soul is escaped as a sparrow out of the snare of the fowlers.’”

Revisiting Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle: “Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905) is a well-known novel that tells a seldom-remembered story. Decades of its usage in U.S. history classes might be to blame. Set in Chicago’s tight-knit Lithuanian community at the start of the twentieth century, The Jungle’s central character, Jurgis Rudkus, is the archetypal immigrant worker, driving himself to the limits of endurance to support a family. But the novel’s few pages describing ghastly conditions in the city’s meat-processing plants are the words that have burned themselves into the public mind – in a way that Rudkus and Sinclair’s other characters never did . . . The degree to which Sinclair exercised authorial license by combining details from the very worst cases into a picture presented as typical of the whole industry is also at issue. He admitted that he was unable to document the book’s most appalling claim: that workers sometimes fell into the vats where animal fat was melted into lard, and their bodies discovered only after prolonged cooking . . . On the other hand, at the height of The Jungle‘s notoriety, Sinclair could shore up his credibility with ‘the court records of many pleas of guilty’ by Chicago’s meat magnates ‘entered in various states to the charge of selling adulterated meat products.’”

Watch these flowers bloom from your home: “A number of gardens and public spaces around the world are documenting the blossoming of cherry blossoms, tulips, orchids and other flora in real time and capturing it via videos and photographs. Here are six to see right now.”

Addison Del Mastro reviews a life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe: “Benjamin Henry Latrobe is, in two ways, not Pierre L’Enfant—he was not, despite his surname, French; and he does not enjoy the same fame (nor is there a prominent square or plaza in Washington, D.C. named after him). But while Latrobe didn’t build Washington itself, he did build the first iteration of the U.S. Capitol, befriend multiple presidents and, among much else, plan and construct Philadelphia’s first waterworks, work on steamboats with Robert Fulton, and furnish the White House with Dolley Madison. ‘Seven years after his arrival in the United States, Benjamin Latrobe had signed on to design the US Capitol.’ So begins Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, by Goucher College professor Jean H. Baker. The expansive biography follows the early American architect and émigré from his English and German childhood in the authoritarian-communitarian Moravian Church to his financially troubled but successful American career.”

P. D. Smith provides a roundup of five new books on Albert Einstein, including one on his time in Britain: “Many countries, including Germany (the land of his birth), Switzerland, the United States and Israel, are associated with Albert Einstein. The fact that Britain is not one of them is an oversight that Andrew Robinson ably rectifies in his new study, Einstein on the Run: How Britain Saved the World’s Greatest Scientist(Yale University Press, £16.99). After all it was a British astronomer, Arthur Stanley Eddington, who was responsible for Einstein’s rise to fame in 1919. Einstein himself acknowledged this, saying, in 1927, that it was in Britain that ‘my work has received greater recognition than anywhere else in the world’. On one of his visits to Britain he declared ‘I love this country’. When he finally found a safe haven in America, he fondly recalled his visits to Britain, ‘the most civilised country of the day’.”

Essay of the Day:

In Outside, Katherine Rowland writes about Lynx Vilden’s immersive courses that teach people to live like cavemen—sort of:

“There are grouse about, Lynx observes on our second day together. She proposes that we go for a hike so she can shoot one for our supper. Barring that, we could aim to dine on wild turkey, which she’s also spotted strutting around the creek banks and the woods. We ready ourselves in the fading afternoon. The sun is quick to slide behind the mountain slopes, and the surrounding forest throws shadows through the growing chill. Lynx takes an appraising look at the rifle she’s been cleaning and then glances at my camera. ‘Better to take the bow?’ she asks. We agree it’s certainly the more primitive option. And besides, the swift hush of an arrow is less likely to scare off the flocks we’d like to eat.

“We walk to the river that marks the limit of her land. There are no birds in sight, but Lynx beams as she gestures up and down the length of the shallow waterway. “Isn’t it beautiful,” she says. Deep in winter, she tells me, she’ll sometimes wake to a sudden silence. Slowly, she’ll realize: the river has frozen.

“Abruptly, she turns and marches up a steep incline. Huffing behind her, I remember her offhand remark that it’s hard to find proper hiking companions because most can’t keep up. She points out another spot where the grouse have been congregating. ‘They’re everywhere until you want to go hunting,’ she says peevishly, and lets loose an arrow through the birdless clearing.

“It’s hard to be a hunter-gatherer these days. Never mind the struggle to meet Maslow’s tenets of survival: being wild verges on illegal. There are limits to how long you can spend on public land. Fires are frequently prohibited, and hunting is closely circumscribed. Lynx came up against the law in 2008, when a government officer attended one of her classes undercover. She was unaware of his identity until two years later, when she was charged for running a course on public land without a permit and for cutting down a freestanding dead tree. She was barred from the national forests of eastern Washington for a year. ‘Sometimes the laws of man and the laws of nature differ,’ she says. ‘I choose the laws of nature.’”

Read the rest.

Photos: Ohio

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