As several readers may know, my day job is looking after Chedworth Roman Villa in the Cotswolds. Chedworth sits comfortably within a region that supported some of the most prosperous rural estates in Britannia. Yet the world that sustained and shaped the villa extended far beyond the Coln valley.
BOOK REVIEWS
Stephen Coan’s The Buried Man can only be described as magisterial. It is the culmination of decades of patient, methodical, and deeply informed scholarship. Coan has lived with, traced, and tracked H. Rider Haggard for much of his adult life, and this monumental volume represents the distillation of that long engagement. It is unlikely to be surpassed for a very long time.
BLUE PLAQUES
At 8am on June 16 1976, a nineteen year-old Tsietsi Mashinini led students on a peaceful march in protest against Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in black schools around Soweto. Within hours of the march, the police and army opened fire on young unarmed school children, killing hundreds in the months that followed.