Engelsberg Ideas

1 day ago | engelsbergideas.com | Malcolm Forbes

Mary Shelley in Bath, introduced by Fiona Sampson, Manderley Press, £19.99The birth of Frankenstein has become the stuff of literary legend. In 1816, the so-called ‘Year Without a Summer’, 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin – not yet Mary Shelley – travelled to Switzerland with her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley, their baby son William and her stepsister Claire Clairmont.

2 days ago | engelsbergideas.com | Eliot Wilson

Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, remembered as ‘the Wise’, died 500 years ago this month. He had a supporting role in the history of the early Reformation as the patron and protector of Martin Luther: from 1518 to his death in 1525, the shield Frederick provided was vital, but the man himself tends to be relegated to footnotes, merely a cog in the machine. There was more to him than that. Frederick was 23 when he succeeded his father Ernest as Elector of Saxony in 1486.

1 week ago | engelsbergideas.com | David Priess

For more than six decades, elements of the US intelligence community have delivered the top-secret President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, to the commander in chief every working day – helping each occupant of the White House remain well informed on a wide range of international challenges. It is the most highly classified regular vehicle for passing analytic judgments about world affairs to the president, a direct and uninterrupted channel which most other US government departments and agencies lack.

1 week ago | engelsbergideas.com | Oscar Wilde |Alexandra Wilson

Cream linen, striped blazers, straw boaters. Tennis parties, cycling excursions, lazy afternoons on the river. ‘Jerusalem’, ‘I was glad’, music-hall songs. This is what the word ‘Edwardian’ conjures up for me, my impressions of the era shaped by E. Nesbit, refined by E.M. Forster, and no doubt distorted by films and television dramas that may or may not have done it justice.

3 weeks ago | engelsbergideas.com | Malcolm Forbes

One hundred years ago, Graham Greene was an Oxford history undergraduate whose standard student activities were complemented, and often complicated, by a dizzying range of extracurricular pursuits. When not attending tutorials, writing essays or getting drunk, Greene was dabbling in acting, flirting with espionage, taking part in debates, editing a literary magazine, planning a programme for the BBC, falling headlong in love, and chancing his luck and risking his life by playing Russian roulette.