TURNING BACK THE CLOCK TO 1885 When Scott finally updated his editor Max Perkins on the progress of his third novel in June 1920, he teased him with a rather surprising spoiler: the new book would be set in the American Midwest in 1885 and would have “a Catholic element.” [52] 1885 had been an…
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The Nightingale Shore Mystery Part VI — Why Kill Florence?
Wrapping this up neatly is not a simple task. It’s January 1920, and fifty-five year old nurse Florence Nightingale Shore enters the carriage of a train on the London to Hastings line. Her friend Mabel who is seeing her off that day, sees a man in a brown suit enter the carriage just as the…
The Nightingale Shore Mystery Part V — Oil Matters
Rafael Farina, the ambitious new head of Mi5’s G4 Russian Section is on the 4th Floor at 4 Queen’s Gate, South Kensington. Ever since the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had agreed to hold trade talks with the Soviet his work has tripled in volume. There was a time when he had just a…
The Nightingale Shore Mystery Part IV — Russians in St Leonards
If Chief Inspector Haigh had been confused by the serial spy capers of his first suspect, Ernest C. Brown, then the intelligence making it on to the desk of the victim’s cousin at Mi5, Rafael Farina, would have been more perplexing still — and also well above his pay grade. On the one hand, Florence…
The Nightingale Shore Mystery Part III — A Cousin at Mi5
It is January 1920, and Britain stands on a razor’s edge. While the government prepares to broker trade with Lenin’s Soviet regime, a bitter faction war is exploding behind the scenes: anti-communist hardliners and intelligence figures are frantically trying to crush the Bolsheviks. At the heart of this fractured shadow-conflict stands Florence Nightingale Shore’s brother,…
American Dreamer — Listen now at Audible.co.uk. Who was the Real Jay Gatsby?
It’s 11.30am on Friday, June 23, 2023. I’ve been rifling the archives and punching in keywords for the past few hours. Suddenly I’m excited. I’ve found a report in a copy of Variety Magazine dated July 27, 1927. It’s unlikely to have been seen by another pair of eyes for close to a 100 years….
The Pink-Suited Polytropoi – The Philosophy of Nietzsche and The Great Gatsby
He waved his hand toward the book-shelves. They’re real … absolutely real … have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real … It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness!What realism! — The…
‘Bob Handley in the gloom of the Cecil’ — F. Scott Fitzgerald in London, July 1921
“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…
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,…