The Rest is History Byron: Dangerous Liaisons (Part 3) By now, Byron had developed his celebrity image- pale, sickly, bulimic and romantic- and given that women were falling over themselves to be with him, he had to suppress his homosexual tendencies. My God, what a mess. There was the androgynous Lady Caroline Lamb, the wife of the man who would later become Lord Melbourne, who became obsessed with him. On the suggestion of her mother-in-law Lady Melbourne aka The Spider, Byron had an on-and-off relationship with the mathematician Annabella Milbanke but, on the side, he was having an affair with his half-sister Augusta. This is all sick, and cruel and when he finally, resentfully, marries Annabella, he has not given up Augusta. Indeed, when Annabella falls pregnant, he names the girl Augusta, although Annabella herself always referred to her as Ada. (In fact, she became Ada Lovelace the mathematician). Eventually Annabella leaves him, but Caroline Lamb is on the rampage again, this time spreading rumours about incest and sodomy. Even though both were true to a certain extent, Byron agreed to flee England again to avoid the scandal.
Emperors of Rome Episode CCXXI – An Entire Farrago (The Catiline Conspiracy II) Some people call the Catiline Conspiracy the ‘second Catiline Conspiracy’. So what was the first conspiracy? Maybe it didn’t even happen and we’re not even sure if Catiline was involved in it anyway. The main source for the ‘first’ conspiracy is Sallust, who wrote it as a flashback when the real Catiline Conspiracy occurred. It seemed to have just fizzled out, as a form of proto-conspiracy. The REAL Catiline Conspiracy, which occured in 63 BC was when Catiline wanted another tilt at being consul, after being thwarted last time. Cicero got the backing of the Optimates compared with Catiline who was seen as a Populare, most of whom he had bribed. But was this really a conspiracy if it happened before the election was even held? Was it just part of Catiline’s pre-election schtick? In his speeches to the men he hoped would support him, he went on about lost liberties and Making Rome Great Again (all sounds very familiar). The whole thing might just be a Sallust invention.
The Documentary (BBC) Assignment: A Slogan and a Land. This is the two-part podcast that I vowed to listen to after hearing the presenter interviewed. He starts off on the banks of the River Jordan, heading for the Sea, which is only 80 km away crossing Israeli settlements and Palestinian villages. Although he intended walking, he soon found that he had to have drivers (one Jewish, one Palestinian) that he alternated between, depending on the nature of the village he was driving through. Quite apart from settlements, the use of animals (sheep, goats) etc and carving out land for nature reserves are all compromising Palestinian land. At the same time there is a demographic battle going on with settler and orthodox Jewish families having many children, as do many Palestinian families. Many of his interviewees are hard-line on both sides. I found myself becoming particularly incensed by the Israeli settler who jeered that the Palestinians didn’t even know how to farm, because the green parts are all Israeli, and the arid parts all Palestinian – with no acknowledgement of the settler water policies that are leading to desertification of Palestinian land. In the second episode, he is more than half-way, and he comes across less strident opinions, with more intermingling of Jewish and Palestinian people, although on the Jewish side October 7 has changed everything. There has been an economic impact on the Palestinian people as well, with wide-scale sacking of Palestinian employees in the wake of the attack. Very interesting and well worth listening to.
History Extra Kindness and Hostility: refugees in wartime Britain. There’s certainly plenty of hostility coming out of peacetime Britain at the moment. Hostility towards refugees in Britain was fairly low-key until the Russian pogroms in 1905 saw an influx of Jewish refugees. Prior to WW2 and Kindertransport notwithstanding, there was a general reluctance to take Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany, largely because there was a fear that huge numbers of Eastern European Jews would follow suit. The Evian Conference of 1938 was a form of refugee ‘green-washing’ with Palestine and the US not even included as options. There was Arab resistance to large-scale emigration, so the UK didn’t push the matter. Until a change in attitude in 1941, there was internment of Jewish refugees during WW2, (even though they were refugees because of Hitler), because of fears that many Jewish refugees working as domestic servants would be ‘spies in the kitchen’. After the war, the British government accepted Polish refugees, but refugees heading for Palestine were intercepted by the British navy and interned until Israel was created and large-scale Jewish emigration began.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 