Writer, historian, FRHistS. Recent: @HistoryToday, @EngelsbergIdeas, @spectator, @FoxedQuarterly. Books: The Favourite, Impossible Journeys, There & Back Again
Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Mathew Lyons
Last of the Cottingley Fairies
The Christmas 1920 issue of The Strand Magazine opened with an ‘an epoch-making event’: Arthur Conan Doyle had photos that proved the existence of fairies. They had been taken three years earlier by Elsie Wright and her cousin Frances Griffiths – 16 and ten – at the bottom of Elsie’s garden in Cottingley, near Bradford. Elsie’s father, an amateur photographer, thought them fake – ‘illustrated fibs’. His daughter had a talent for art and a fierce imagination.
An ode to the humble herring
Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring: Adventures with the King of Fishes, Graeme Rigby, Hurst, £25 Not many encyclopedias have a hero. This one does: the Atlantic herring, Clupea harengus, which makes the longest migrations of all its brethren, touching on many histories, many shores. To some it is ‘king of the fishes’. But it has other names, too. For many, herring are silver darlings, their scales giving iridescent lustre to blue-green backs and white bellies.
Beginning of the Spanish Civil War
Spain lost the last of its empire in the Americas in 1898 and was left deeply divided. Democrats hoped for reform; authoritarians called for an ‘iron surgeon’ to treat the nation’s ills. In 1917 a general strike was brutally suppressed by the army. Politics were volatile: prime minister Eduardo Dato was assassinated in 1921; he had five successors in two years. In 1923 General Miguel Primo de Rivera overthrew the last of them. ‘My Mussolini’, the king, Alfonso XIII, called him.
The First Tour de France
Cycle racing was all the rage. The Paris-Brest-Paris race was launched in 1891. (Its inaugural edition saw a car take on the cyclists. The car lost.) The first Paris-Roubaix race, a triumph for its promoter, the daily sports paper Le Vélo, came in 1896. In 1900 a rival paper, L’Auto, was founded. It struggled until a young journalist, Géo Lefèvre, came up with an idea to boost circulation: a race around France. It began on 1 July 1903.
The Affair of the Diamond Necklace
The necklace didn’t have a name. People described it as ‘en esclavage’ – a slave necklace – for the way its triple rows of diamonds, 647 of them, hung like chains around the neck. It didn’t have an owner, either. Its creator, Charles Auguste Boehmer, court jeweller to Louis XVI, made it expecting a royal sale. Worth two million francs, only royalty could afford it. But Marie Antoinette wasn’t buying. ‘We have more need for ships than diamonds’, she said. Desperate, Boehmer lowered the price.
The First Venice Biennale
The art world was in ferment in the late 19th century. In Paris and Vienna radical ideas were everywhere. But in the newly founded kingdom of Italy things were different. ‘Who ever in Italy spoke or wrote about any type of artistic venture was tolling a death bell’, the young art critic Ugo Ojetti said. True, there had been a successful one-off exhibition in Venice in 1887.
End of the Pastry War
The plebeian riot of December 1828 swept like ‘a voracious fire’ through the Parian, a luxury goods emporium in Mexico City’s central square, the city’s governor said. In quelling the violence, soldiers destroyed the premises of a French patissier, causing 1,000 pesos worth of damage. The dispute escalated. Ten years later a French fleet arrived to blockade Mexico’s Gulf Coast ports; they demanded 600,000 pesos in restitution. It became known as the Guerra de los Pasteles, the Pastry War.
End of the Pastry War
The plebeian riot of December 1828 swept like ‘a voracious fire’ through the Parian, a luxury goods emporium in Mexico City’s central square, the city’s governor said. In quelling the violence, soldiers destroyed the premises of a French patissier, causing 1,000 pesos worth of damage. The dispute escalated. Ten years later a French fleet arrived to blockade Mexico’s Gulf Coast ports; they demanded 600,000 pesos in restitution. It became known as the Guerra de los Pasteles, the Pastry War.
Massacre at Glencoe
On 1 February 1692 a 120-strong detachment from the Argyll regiment under Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon approached Glencoe in Scotland’s western Highlands. Glenlyon had orders to quarter his men among the Macdonald families in the glen, in lieu of unpaid taxes. Traditional rules of hospitality meant that they were welcomed. Iain MacIain, elderly head of the local Macdonald clan, was wary however. He ordered the young, unmarried women to be sent away.
Massacre at Glencoe
On 1 February 1692 a 120-strong detachment from the Argyll regiment under Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon approached Glencoe in Scotland’s western Highlands. Glenlyon had orders to quarter his men among the Macdonald families in the glen, in lieu of unpaid taxes. Traditional rules of hospitality meant that they were welcomed. Iain MacIain, elderly head of the local Macdonald clan, was wary however. He ordered the young, unmarried women to be sent away.
The Last Emirate of Spain
By the late 15th century the Nasrid emirate of Granada, Islam’s last foothold in Spain, stretched from Seville in the west to Vera in the east, and south from Córdoba to the straits of Gibraltar. Granada, an Egyptian traveller said, was ‘one of the greatest and most beautiful cities of the west’. But the emirate was in trouble. ‘The soil is poor for … grain and little suited to … vegetables’, Ibn Khaldun wrote. Food was imported from the Maghreb, mostly by Genoese merchants.
The Last Emirate of Spain
By the late 15th century the Nasrid emirate of Granada, Islam’s last foothold in Spain, stretched from Seville in the west to Vera in the east, and south from Córdoba to the straits of Gibraltar. Granada, an Egyptian traveller said, was ‘one of the greatest and most beautiful cities of the west’. But the emirate was in trouble. ‘The soil is poor for … grain and little suited to … vegetables’, Ibn Khaldun wrote. Food was imported from the Maghreb, mostly by Genoese merchants.
The Death of Charles the Bad
One night in January 1354 a group of armed men burst into a room in a Normandy inn and dragged the man asleep there naked from his bed. He begged for his life on his knees. He offered money. He offered land. People counted 80 stab wounds in his body the next day. The body belonged to Charles d’Espagne, constable of France and its most powerful figure after the king, Jean II. The man responsible for his death was Jean’s son-in-law, the 22-year-old Charles II of Navarre.
The Death of Charles the Bad
One night in January 1354 a group of armed men burst into a room in a Normandy inn and dragged the man asleep there naked from his bed. He begged for his life on his knees. He offered money. He offered land. People counted 80 stab wounds in his body the next day. The body belonged to Charles d’Espagne, constable of France and its most powerful figure after the king, Jean II. The man responsible for his death was Jean’s son-in-law, the 22-year-old Charles II of Navarre.
The First Christmas Celebration
When was Christ born? Early opinion differed. Clement of Alexandria, at the turn of the third century, thought it was 20 May. The first recorded celebration of 25 December doesn’t arrive until 336 in an almanac that lists Roman holidays and the city’s consuls and prefects. It also lists martyrs. At the top of that list is the date 25 December: ‘natus Christus in Betleem Judeae’, the text runs. One theory is that the date was chosen because it was the pagan solstice festival of Sol Invictus.
Jacquard Patents His First Loom
When the computer pioneer Charles Babbage received guests, he liked to show them a framed portrait of the French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard seated beside a model of his loom. ‘Oh, that engraving?’ the duke of Wellington asked when his attention was drawn to it. But it wasn’t an engraving. It was a sheet of finely woven silk – a thousand threads to the inch – so subtle and detailed that it deceived many who saw it.
Jacquard Patents His First Loom
When the computer pioneer Charles Babbage received guests, he liked to show them a framed portrait of the French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard seated beside a model of his loom. ‘Oh, that engraving?’ the duke of Wellington asked when his attention was drawn to it. But it wasn’t an engraving. It was a sheet of finely woven silk – a thousand threads to the inch – so subtle and detailed that it deceived many who saw it.
The First Christmas Celebration
When was Christ born? Early opinion differed. Clement of Alexandria, at the turn of the third century, thought it was 20 May. The first recorded celebration of 25 December doesn’t arrive until 336 in an almanac that lists Roman holidays and the city’s consuls and prefects. It also lists martyrs. At the top of that list is the date 25 December: ‘natus Christus in Betleem Judeae’, the text runs. One theory is that the date was chosen because it was the pagan solstice festival of Sol Invictus.
How Hans Holbein brought portraiture to England
Holbein: Renaissance Master Paul Mellon Centre, pp.424, 40 On the evening of 6 May 1527, Henry VIII entertained an embassy from France at a lavish party in Greenwich. The festivities took place in a banqueting house and a theatre, both built for the occasion. At the feast’s end, Henry led his guests out through a great archway. After a moment, he invited the French to turn around and look at a painting which hung behind them.
The Longest-Running Newspaper
The ancestor of the London Gazette was launched on 16 November 1665, surviving its bitter rival to become the oldest newspaper in the English-speaking world still in print. The Restoration government needed to manage the news. In 1663 it gave the job to its censor, Roger L’Estrange. It was not a good fit. The news, he wrote, ‘makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiours’. His indifference made him careless.
The Longest-Running Newspaper
The ancestor of the London Gazette was launched on 16 November 1665, surviving its bitter rival to become the oldest newspaper in the English-speaking world still in print. The Restoration government needed to manage the news. In 1663 it gave the job to its censor, Roger L’Estrange. It was not a good fit. The news, he wrote, ‘makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiours’. His indifference made him careless.
England v France: Has history got it all wrong?
A depiction of the Battle of Crécy in 1346, from a 15th-century illuminated manuscript of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles - The Picture Art Collection/Alamy It was early in 1292, most likely during Lent. Two ships rounding the Brittany coast anchored at the small islet of Quéménès. One was from Normandy, at that point loyal to the King of France, Philippe IV; the other was from Aquitaine, whose duke was the King of England, Edward I.
The Battle of Stamford Bridge
As brothers, a contemporary wrote in the Life of King Edward, Harold and Tostig Godwinson were ‘handsome and graceful … similar in strength … equally brave’. Did they have flaws? The eulogist chose his words carefully. ‘Both at times so cleverly disguised their intentions that one who did not know them was in doubt what to think.’ Perhaps they didn’t really know each other.
The Lin Biao Incident Original
At around 2.30 am on 13 September 1971 a British-made Trident airliner crashed in Eastern Mongolia. On board was 63-year-old Lin Biao – then vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and minister of national defence, as well as the official heir to the elderly Mao Zedong – along with Lin’s wife and one of his sons. There were no survivors.
The Battle of Stamford Bridge
As brothers, a contemporary wrote in the Life of King Edward, Harold and Tostig Godwinson were ‘handsome and graceful … similar in strength … equally brave’. Did they have flaws? The eulogist chose his words carefully. ‘Both at times so cleverly disguised their intentions that one who did not know them was in doubt what to think.’ Perhaps they didn’t really know each other.
The Church of England’s Great Ejection
In the Declaration of Breda of April 1660, Charles II promised ‘liberty to tender consciences’. But his first parliament, summoned the following year, was less keen. In May 1662 it passed an Act of Uniformity demanding all clergymen accept the newly issued Book of Common Prayer by 24 August, St Bartholomew’s Day, that year. Those that didn’t would be evicted from their livings. There were problems with that. Some were doctrinal.
Charles de Gaulle is Sentenced to Death
On 17 June 1940, when Marshal Pétain surrendered France to the Nazis, 49-year-old General Charles de Gaulle was in London. The next day he made a broadcast on the BBC: ‘Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not go out’, he declared. The Vichy government ordered him back to France. In London, support for him was thin.
Charles de Gaulle is Sentenced to Death
On 17 June 1940, when Marshal Pétain surrendered France to the Nazis, 49-year-old General Charles de Gaulle was in London. The next day he made a broadcast on the BBC: ‘Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not go out’, he declared. The Vichy government ordered him back to France. In London, support for him was thin.
Kikunae Ikeda’s MSG Revolution
For Yi Yin, adviser to China’s Shang dynasty in the second millennium BC, there were five tastes: bitter, salt, sweet, sour, and pungent. For Aristotle there were seven: to Yi Yin’s list he would have added astringent and harsh. But only the first four were widely accepted. That is, until Kikunae Ikeda, a professor of chemistry in Tokyo, added a fifth. Born in 1864, Ikeda had studied in London and Leipzig, where he first encountered tomato, asparagus, meat, and cheese.
Kikunae Ikeda’s MSG Revolution
For Yi Yin, adviser to China’s Shang dynasty in the second millennium BC, there were five tastes: bitter, salt, sweet, sour, and pungent. For Aristotle there were seven: to Yi Yin’s list he would have added astringent and harsh. But only the first four were widely accepted. That is, until Kikunae Ikeda, a professor of chemistry in Tokyo, added a fifth. Born in 1864, Ikeda had studied in London and Leipzig, where he first encountered tomato, asparagus, meat, and cheese.
The Death of the Great Barnato Original
‘Murder!’ The cry woke fourth officer William Clifford from his sleep on the deck of the SS Scot. Seeing a man disappearing overboard, Clifford leapt after him. It was June 1897 and the Scot was in high seas south of Madeira, bound for Southampton from Cape Town. The man kept swimming powerfully away from the ship. Clifford got within ten yards of him, but it was too late. A lifeboat fished them both out of the water. The man, floating face down, was dead. His name was Barney Barnato.
The First Men’s Cricket World Cup
It was a different time. Cricket had yet to discover money. The first men’s World Cup in 1975, a 60-over competition, changed that. ‘World Cup nets cricket a £200,000 bonanza’, the Daily Mail reported with awe. The cricket was different. South Africa was banned because of apartheid. A team from East Africa competed, comprising players from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia. Attitudes were different too.
Marcus Garvey Meets the KKK
In the 30 years to 1918 some 2,552 Black people were murdered by lynch mobs in the United States. Most of these killings took place in the South, home of the Invisible Empire, otherwise known as the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK, born in the aftermath of Confederate defeat in the American Civil War, was largely moribund before the end of the 19th century; but D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation romanticised and resurrected it. Lynch mob culture was Klannish to its core.
The First Men’s Cricket World Cup
It was a different time. Cricket had yet to discover money. The first men’s World Cup in 1975, a 60-over competition, changed that. ‘World Cup nets cricket a £200,000 bonanza’, the Daily Mail reported with awe. The cricket was different. South Africa was banned because of apartheid. A team from East Africa competed, comprising players from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia. Attitudes were different too.
The Otsu Incident
For one terrifying moment it seemed that history was repeating itself. In early 1881 the Russian tsar Alexander II had been assassinated. And now, a decade later on 11 May 1891, an assassin brought a sabre down on his grandson Nicholas’ bowler-hatted head. The 22-year-old tsarevich was in Japan on a tour of the East. He had already seen Sri Lanka, Singapore, and China.
Execution of the Thief-Taker General
‘As soon as anything is missing, suspected to be stolen’, the British Journal reported wearily in February 1725, ‘the first course we steer is directly to the office of Mr Jonathan Wild.’ That office was in the Old Bailey. Wild himself was the self-styled ‘Thief-catcher General of Great Britain’. And it was true: he delivered dozens of criminals to justice. The reason for that was simple: Wild had likely also organised the theft.
How monks shaped Christendom
The Monastic World: A 1,200-Year History, Andrew Jotischky, Yale University Press, £25 Perhaps aptly, for institutions that laid claim to eternity, there is no agreed origin for monasticism. Saint Jerome, writing around the turn of the fourth century, believed that it began with Christians fleeing into the desert to escape Roman persecution.
Three projects on J.S. Bach’s sacred works are nearing completion
Three projects shedding light on the sacred music of J.S. Bach are nearing completion. The first consists of an epic twenty-five-year project to record all the composer’s vocal works — passions, masses, motets and 200-odd cantatas — in electrifying performances supplemented by lectures and workshops. At the helm is a Swiss choral conductor renowned for his improvisatory skills — and surely the only baroque specialist to have played Sidney Bechet on a chamber organ.
The Affair of the Sausages
The Reformation in Switzerland began quietly. On the evening of 9 March 1522, the first Sunday in Lent, what one historian has called ‘the ostentatious eating of sausages’ took place in the parlour of Zurich printer Christoph Froschauer. It was a provocative act, in breach of church rules on fasting. Twelve people were present. Some later became Anabaptists; one, a bootmaker named Hottinger, would be beheaded in Baden two years later for challenging the Mass.
The sexual escapades of Edmund White
Edmund White grew up in a world where sex, and gay sex in particular, was an unspoken reality. In 1950s Cincinnati, “no one ‘came out’ except drag queens and the campy peroxided waiter at the diner,” he writes in the first chapter of The Loves of My Life. That blanket of near-silence doesn’t seem to have inhibited him much. He was sexually precocious from the age of twelve, as his autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) first suggested.
Going, going, gone… #3
This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts
The bleak genius of Charles M Schulz and Peanuts
This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts
Should we thank Islam for the most beautiful buildings in Christendom?
Romanesque or Islamesque? The gothic cathedral of Santiago de Compostela - Moment RF By the end of the 11th century, Muslim Europe was in retreat. In Spain, Christian kingdoms were slowly pushing south; in Sicily, over 200 years of Islamic rule had been ended by the Norman conquest of the island. One unexpected result of this intermingling of peoples was an unparalleled assimilation of Islamic knowledge and skill into Christian architecture.
The Mayerling Incident: scandal, suicide and the Bavarian kink
Around noon on 30 January 1889 Austria’s official newspaper Wiener Zeitung in Vienna reported that Crown Prince Rudolf, the 30-year-old heir to the fraying and fractious Austro-Hungarian Empire and husband of Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, had died that morning of a stroke. It was a lie. The following day, the court issued a clarification: Rudolf had died of heart failure. That also was a lie.
The St Brice’s Day Massacre
The sums are eye-watering. In 991 the English king Æthelred paid the Vikings £10,000 to stop them sacking the east coast of England. Three years later a sum variously recorded as £16,000 or £22,000 was given. In 1002 they were back: this time they got £34,000. No one could say that Æthelred didn’t try bribery first. But what then? The answer, it seems, was butchery. On St Brice’s Day, 13 November 1002, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says Æthelred ‘ordered all the Danish men who were in England to be slain’.
Going, going, gone… #2
As I said introducing my previous post on this theme, we try to go to as many viewings as we can at the big auction houses in London: you get to see so many wonderful works of art as they pass briefly from private collection to private collection. This week the focus has been on the Impressionists and both 20th-century and contemporary work.
Scribbling in the margins
I didn’t recognise the book on my shelf. I barely noticed it, in fact, scanning the titles quickly for a different one I had mislaid. But somehow the thin tattered spine of its dusty, crumbling dust jacket caught my eye as it rested in the shadowed end of the book case. It was one of my Dad’s from his radical student days. I had kept a few of them when we had cleared my parents’ house. Mum and Dad met in the Young Communist League a couple of years after the war.
We’ll never know what treasures the Tudor Reformation robbed us of
Saints: A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic riverrun, pp.400, 30 In 1693, quarrymen working near Caerleon, outside Newport in Wales, uncovered an alabaster sculpture of a figure they did not recognise. The man wore a suit of armour, which had once been covered in gold leaf. In one hand he held a sword, in the other a pair of scales.
The Rebirth of Chivalry is Rained Off
It began as a joke. There were grumbles of conservative discontent about the lack of ceremony at the coronation of Queen Victoria in June 1838. Where was the ceremonial banquet? Where was the Royal Champion? They called it the ‘Penny Crowning’, a tawdry, cheap shadow of the real thing.
Thomas Kyd: fragments of a life
The life and work of the Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Kyd offer a perfect example of the problems posed by the erosion of evidence over time, since what little we do know seems wholly arbitrary in its survival, yet also hints at the enormity of what we have lost. Kyd, a prosperous scrivener’s son whose family hailed from the area around Lombard Street, was born in 1558 – he was baptised on 6 November – six years before Shakespeare and Marlowe and fourteen before Jonson.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Mathew
Contact Mathew, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack