Tuesday 1 September 2020

Plug

Any excuse for a picture of Dieppe, especially if it's by Sickert – and today's excuse is a piece by me on Oscar Wilde (and others) in Dieppe that's in the September issue of the excellent online magazine British Intelligence, out today.

9 comments:

  1. I was looking forward to one of those common entrance tyoe essays: Write about tying a shoelace; write about a threepenny bit; write about a plug.

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  2. Ho ho. Hope you're not disappointed Zoe!

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  3. This paragraph should be the one moment to feel happy in the Wilde story, but the poignance of these momentary kindnesses moved me almost to tears;
    "Others were kinder. On one occasion when Wilde was being publicly humiliated in a café, Fritz Thaulow walked over and loudly invited him to dinner en famille. And Mrs Arthur Stannard, who wrote bestselling novels under the name of ‘John Strange Winter’, took pains to make him feel welcome, on one occasion intervening when Wilde had been pointedly cut by a group of English visitors to demand in a loud voice, ‘Oscar, take me to tea!’ "
    Beautiful piece

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  4. Excellent. Here,in Brazil,we use in an awful french, dieppe is a kinda decadence Avec elegance

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  5. And dieppe was liberated by canadians,isn't It?

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  6. An awful lot of Canadians died in the calamitous Dieppe raid, mown down by the Germans who had little trouble defending the port from seaborne invasion. There's a museum in Dieppe devoted entirely to the terrible events of the Dieppe raid – and a memorial garden – and monuments all along the esplanade. Movingly, there are even little monuments to individual soldiers who made it into the old town before being killed. Ties between Dieppe and Canada (particularly Quebec) go back centuries.

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  7. Oh yes, and the Canadians did indeed liberate Dieppe in 1944.

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    Replies
    1. My granchildren are canadians. Thai's the reason why I am só interested in history of canadians

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    2. My son in law too, so two of my grandchildren are half Canadian.

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