“There was London, and Wopping with Shane Leslie and strawberries as big as tomatoes at Lady Randolph Churchills. There was St. Johns Ervine’s wooden leg and Bob Handley in the gloom of the Cecil.” [1] Bob’s name appeared among several names and places mentioned in entries in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ledger covering his trip to…
Month: September 2026
Like Kant at the Church Steeple
There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby’s enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour — The Great Gatsby [2] The Catholic ‘Americanist’ priest, Isaac Hecker, believed that when Kant had asked the question, ‘what can I know?’ and answered it…
A Circus Comes to Town — Gatsby, Gurdjieff and The New Romanticism
In 1907, Alfred Richard Orage, an acolyte of Nietzsche, would write an influential essay for The Theosophical Review in which he made an appeal for a ‘New Romanticism’: “Romanticism is in essence an attempt to escape from the compulsory vision of things as they are, by imagining them to be what they are not.” Orage,…
I Am Kloot – Sky At Night
You can’t polish a turd. Whoever said that? Were they onto something or were they just talking shit? The reality was something we knew all along: the turd was quite happy feeling shit. When you’ve been unceremoniously squeezed out of someone’s arse and suffered the ignominy of being chewed up, absorbed and subjected to the…
Unravelling Trotsky’s New York Visit, Jan-March 1917 – Part I
An article written by rights activist, Henry Moskowitz, in February 1918, said that to understand Leon Trotsky’s infamous sudden visit to the Lower East Side of New York in January the previous year, you also had to understand the local landscape upon which his “powerful figure” was “silhouetted”. Its streets “were black with men, women…
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald at the Embassy Club, London
During their stays in London in 1921 and 1925, their London host, Shane Leslie, introduced Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to an illustrious parade of British dignitaries that included his aunt, Lady Randolph (Jennie) Churchill — the New York-born mother of Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, and Leslie’s cousin, Winston Churchill — and the…
69 Love Songs: L.D Beghtol talks Magnetic Fields & Three Terrors
It’s hard to believe, but this interview is now some 25 years old. It was given by Beghtol from his office in Manhattan, and published just a month before 9/11. It was after that, that the world changed forever. For the many who have probably forgotten, Beghtol provided several of the standout ‘turns’ on The…
The Barbara Lopukhin Kidnap Plot
Little more than a year after the Russian Free Library’s Alexei Teplov found himself dodging spies in Hastings, the seaside resort and its neighbour Bexhill on Sea, would feature in a more sinister tale of counter-espionage, when the daughter of the former Director of the Department of Police (Fontanka) in St Petersburg and Kishinev, Aleksey…
A Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing — The Truth About The Manchester Arena Bombing
No Alarms and No Surprises. Please May 22nd 2017, 22.31 (BST) On Monday, May 22nd 2017, Salman Abedi walked into the City Room foyer at the Manchester Arena at Hunts Bank in Central Manchester and detonated an explosive suicide device. Within seconds, the innocent giddy replay of post-concert highlights as the kids typed-in messages and…
Spy Comedy in Hastings
On January 27th 1905, the Daily News announced that a “special staff of Russian police spies” had arrived in London. [1] The following month, the New York Times and The Daily Express would publish a more detailed report based on an interview with Vladimir Burtsev’s colleague, Georgii Ivanovich Rabinovitch, claiming much the same thing, only…