The Times Historical Archive

‘This is Not A Coup’: Reflections on the Political History of Emmerson Mnangagwa

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RIP Robert Mugabe

│By Lyndsey England, Gale Ambassador at Durham University│

On the 18th of November 2017, the people of Zimbabwe took to the streets of Harare. Men, women and children walked alongside armed military vehicles, shaking hands with soldiers and standing in solidarity with strangers. In a mass demonstration, members of the public marched united through the capital, calling for the resignation of President Robert Gabriel Mugabe. The march was treated as a ground-breaking moment in Zimbabwean history; an unprecedented declaration of the public’s antipathy towards Mr. Mugabe, the war hero who had ruled since the country’s independence in 1980.

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A Centenary Celebration for Stonehenge

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On 31st October 1918, Stonehenge was gifted to the nation by local landowner Cecil Chubb. As has been widely reported in the media, English Heritage are running a series of projects and events to celebrate the centenary, including the fascinating recreation of photographs taken by visitors to the stones during the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s in their ‘Then and Now’ Project.

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‘An artist who can get away with this’: The Press Response to Yves Klein’s 1957 London Exhibition

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Yves Klein calls his pictures “Propositions.” He very carefully roughens the surfaces so as to express his sensibility. Then he invites the spectator to share the artist’s sensibility by “allowing the mind to plunge into the heart of the colour.”[1]

The debate around modern art versus representational art had begun by the 1950s. The pages of The Listener had followed the debates, as a subject that had “often led to controversy”[2]. Modern art was perceived as an area where “execution determines design instead of design determining execution”, and the modern artist “has done away with the rational meaning of the subject-matter required in traditional art and allows unconscious phantasy to express itself more clearly”[3]. Klein, as the emerging face of modern art, represented this, arguing “that our primary ocular sensation is that of colour, and that he, as an artist, wishes to free this sensation of colour from all extraneous or limiting circumstances.”[4]

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One Man in Wangaratta

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The town of Wangaratta in the north of Victoria, Australia, has a population of approximately 19,000, but little does that population realise that one amongst their number is a man who, but for an accident of history, could today be the King of England. This matter was originally researched by the British historian, Dr. Michael Jones, in 2003, and it can be updated with the help of Gale Primary Sources.

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The Only Way is Wessex: Thomas Hardy’s Cultural Impressions

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By Daniel Mercieca, Gale Ambassador at Durham University

“She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.” [i]

The well-trodden Dorsetshire heathlands, bustling rustic communities and evanescent ghosts from Thomas Hardy’s folkloric world, Wessex, continue to impress memories of English rural heritage. Hardy’s sensitive capturing of ‘mere impressions of the moment’ in prose and poetry; the cascade of raindrops on a gate, hazy warmth of a barn dance or ghostly silhouette of a horse rider in sea mist, reinvigorates our appreciation of ordinary experience [ii]. This year marks the 90th anniversary of Hardy’s final collection of verse, Winter Words in Various Moods and Meters (1928), whose sombre cadences echo amongst later generations of modern poets and can be found in The Times Historical Archive. The continual resurgence of Hardy’s works in dramatic and televisual adaptations, modern poetry and National Trust Heritage fosters a Wessex mythology which remains vibrant today.

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