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Lesley-Ann Jones' biography,  The Real Life of Freddie Mercury: Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mecury,  revealed a bril­liant musician keep­ing his true self hidden from an adoring world-wide audience. Farrokh Bulsara/Freddie Mercury (1946-1991) was born on the small British protectorate island of Zanzibar , a semi-autonomous reg­ion of Tanzania that specialised in spices. When he was 8, his relig­ious Parsi parents Bomi (a British civil servant) and Jer Bulsara sent him to an English boarding school outside Bombay. At St Peter's School , Freddie loved music. The school prin­cipal noticed Freddie's musical talent, and wrote to his parents suggesting that they might want to pay an extra on Freddie's school fees to help him musical­ly. They agreed, and Fred­die began to learn to play the piano. He also became a member of the school choir and took part in theatrical pro­ductions. In 1958, Freddie Bulsara and four other school friends formed a rock band. But it...

50,000 Jews lived in Kishinev (now Ukraine) in 1900, 46% of the total population. Kishinev was the 5th largest Jewish city in the Russian Empire city after Warsaw, Odessa, Lodz and Vilna. Thanks to the book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Steven Zipperstein, 2018) and to my grandfather. Rumours of attacks surfaced before Easter each year in Kishinev. Acc­usations of ritual murder in Pavel Krushevan ’s anti-Semitic newspaper, Bessarabets , remained ugly; there were rumours of menacing anti-Jewish meetings held in the back room of a Kishinev tavern, and leaflets calling for the beating of Jews were left in bars and cheap restaurants. By then Bessarabets had launched a semi-secret, anti-Semitic soc­iety. Against this backdrop, Jewish anxieties were heightened. Jewish shop owners took home bank records, receipts and financial doc­u­ments for safekeeping. Employees were told that shops could stay shut after the Passover festival. Heartbroken fathers claimed their children'...

The film “ Klimt and Schiele: Eros and Psyche, 1918-2018 - Scandals, Dreams, Obsessions in Vienna's Golden Age ” analysed turn-of-the-century Vienna art. The film guided viewers through the Albertina, Belvedere, Leopold, Freud , Kunsthistorisches and Wien Museums and through exhibitions of Klimt and Schiele’s works. The film retraced this extraordinary era: a magical moment for art, music and literature, in which new ideas circul­ated. Life took place in salons where artists, politicians and scientists met each other. Talented women like Alma Mahler-Werfel, Lina Loos or Bertha Zuckerkandl began to emancipate themselves. The Kunstschau/Art Show of 1908 was arranged by artists in the Gustav Klimt Group and coincided with celebrations held in Vienna for the 60th anniversary of Emperor Francis Joseph I’s reign. The artists were offered the use of vacant land, which had been designated for an eventual Konzerthaus, as an interim exhibition venue. In only a few months, Josef Hoff...

David Goldblatt (1930-2018) was born in South Africa , the grandson of Lithuanian refugees who fled their homeland in 1893. Goldblatt worked in his father's men's wear shop and graduated from the Uni­versity of the Witwatersrand with a commerce degree. He lived in Johannesburg where he began photographing in 1948 and documenting devel­op­ments in Apartheid South Africa. Goldblatt grew up during the rise of the National Party. When the Party came to power in 1948, the Nationals began implementing Apartheid policies that marginalised non-white South Africans. In this difficult political environment, young Goldblatt dev­eloped an interest in photography-focused magazines like Life  and wanted to become a magazine photographer. Then, when the African National Congress became active in their struggle against Apart­heid, the editor of Picture Post asked him to photograph ANC meetings. Young men with dompas the identity document that every black South African had to carry, 1972. A ...

By the time we were selecting our own clothes in the 1960s, the times were too hippy for my generation to tolerate Christian Dior  (1905–1957)’s post-war fashions. But now it is time for us to re-examine our old views. Born in Normandy and moved to Paris when he was a child, the Dior family name was known for his father’s successful fertiliser comp­any. As an adult, Dior immersed himself in the capital’s creative scene, under the care of Robert Piguet, fashion designer who trained Hubert de Givenchy. Following France's surrender to Germany in 1940, Dior returned to Paris, where he was soon hired by couturier Lucien Lelong . Through­out the remaining years of the war, including when Dior was serving in the French army, Lelong's design house dressed the women of the Nazis and of French collab­orat­ors. During this same time, Dior's younger sister, Catherine, was working for the French Resistance. Dior, bar suit, 1947 silk jacket and wool crêpe skirt How did Christian Dior ...

Queen Victoria ’s unsatisfactory grandson, Prince Albert Duke of Clarence , second in line to the British throne, desperately needed a bride. Earlier attempts to marry this useless duke off to foreign princesses had failed, so Queen Victoria was relieved when, in 1891, Mary of Teck (1867-1953) loved the prospect of becoming Britain’s queen and immediately accepted the duke’s hand. But this plan had to be abandoned when the duke died of pneumonia soon after the engagement. Instead Mary became engaged to his brother, the Duke of York , who in 1910 was crowned King George V and she his queen consort. King George V and Queen Mary at their coronation, 1911 Queen Mary of Teck and King George V had 6 children, of whom 5 survived to adulthood. Mary lived through the reigns of her sons, King Edward VIII and King George VI . In 1952, her eldest grandchild became Queen Elizabeth II and in 1953 Queen Mary died at Marlborough House, aged 85. Royal librarian Owen Morshead asked James Pope-Henness...

Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896) built the Kensington studio-house from 1865 on. With the Victorian art market booming, and domestic taste fascin­ating the middle classes, Leight­on needed to demonstrate his importance. After all, he was both president of the Royal Academy and chief exponent of the new Aesth­eticism. Leighton House was to be his link to a special society, so #2 Holland Park Rd needed to be special. Fortunately Leighton was enjoying increasingly high fees for his paint­ings, and he also had family money. Leighton and his arch­itect, George Ait­ch­ison , chose the decorat­ive elements for their aesthetic effect, wherever they came from. The result incorp­or­at­ed styles from Arts and Crafts , Orientalism and Baroque . Adding to the building for years, he end­ed up with one of the most talked-about houses in the country. Around the dome was a super frieze made up of tiny tiles, commis­sioned from artist Walter Crane (1845-1915), who did the work in Venice and then ...

Born in Nymphenburg Castle Munich , Ludwig (1845-1886) was a mem­ber of the Wittelsbach dynasty. He became King Ludwig II of Bavaria in 1864 at 18 when his father died, but alas for the Bavarians, Ludwig had no interest in politics. He became a lonely, isolated man, with no wife and no friends. His diaries suggested this devout Roman Cathol­ic king struggled with his sexual orientation during his adult life. He was either straight, gay, bisexual or celib­ate, worry­ingly eccentric and he built expensive mountain castles. Wagner trained Ludwig's brother  Prince Paul von Thurn und Taxis in his opera Loh­engrin, per­formed for the king's 20th birth­day in Aug 1865 in Hohenschwangau. The opera was well staged with Prince Paul dressed as the hero Lohengrin in silver armour, drawn over the lake by an artificial swan. The King sat alone, enraptured with the music. King Ludwig was possessed by the idea of a holy kingdom by the Grace of God.  Yet he had only two passions in life: cas...

In 1870, the vast area called Rupert's Land was transferred from the Hudson's Bay Company and purchased by the new Dominion of Canada. The sudden shift of authority and resultant uncertainty among the inhabitants of the region erupted into the Red River Rebellion of 1869-70 . It was essential that order be restored by the newly formed federal government in Ottawa. In 1872 a colonel in the Canadian Militia was dispatched into the Northwest on a governmental fact-finding journ­ey. He recommended that a regiment of 550 mounted riflemen be organised to preserve order in the terr­it­ory, and to protect the surveyors and railway builders who were working their way to the Pacific coast. In Ottawa, 1st Prime Minister Sir John Macdonald (1867–73) was soon aware of the viol­ence in the USA’s western plains and did not want these problems repeated in Canada! In May 1873 Macdonald successfully introd­uced a bill to est­ab­lish a police force in the territor­ies: Manitoba, parts of Sask­a...