Easter chess
4 April
2 April
The clearest echo, of course, is Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which mirrors Nasser’s decision to thwart passage through the Suez Canal. In both cases, it was a foreseeable response that the attacking parties somehow failed to anticipate: “Instead of keeping the Suez Canal open, the [Anglo-French] action closed it, as the dumbest intelligence analyst, either British or American, could have predicted,” Miles Copeland, a famous C.I.A. agent working in the Middle East in the nineteen-fifties, wrote...
...The grimmer parallel is what all this may reveal about American power. By 1956, Britain and France were already empires in decline: Britain had let go of its major colonial possessions in the Indian subcontinent, while France had suffered major losses in Indochina and was in the throes of an era-defining battle to hold Algeria, where Nasser’s anti-colonialist message was proving persuasive. Their failure to retake the canal underscored their diminished status on a world stage.
From the New Yorker
31 March
Artist David Milne (1882–1953) was a contemporary of theirs and shared a keen interest in the Canadian landscape, occasionally painting with them in northern Ontario and the Muskokas. But he was profoundly different from them. He preferred solitude. He was a loner. His work moved in a quieter, more distilled direction, especially after the First World War.
Determined to witness war zones, he secured a commission as an official Canadian war artist. After the Armistice, he travelled to France and Belgium, where he produced sketches of ruined towns, flooded craters, shattered churches, and the quiet routines of soldiers waiting to go home.
Much more - including sketches - here.
30 March