This report of a fire without serious casualties at Grenfell Tower in June 1979 assumes an entirely new and frightening meaning in the context of the tragic events of 14 June 2017, when a horrific cladding fire at the same tower caused the deaths of seventy- two people. Tucked into a folder of newspaper cuttings in the archives of the Royal Borough of Ken sington and Chelsea (RBKC), the articl…
In popular myth Nansen is the archetypal Scandinavian polar explorer – a manly, no- nonsense hero with little time for the sentimentality or plodding amateurism of his British contemporaries.1 However, Nansen’s account of this expedition, Farthest North (1897), reveals someone with a deeply romantic outlook whose musings on the Arctic ‘dreamland’ have much in common with the…
This book attempts to understand the origins and development of religious belief in Iceland and greater Scandinavia through the lenses of five carefully selected Icelandic folktales collected in Iceland during the nineteenth century. Each of these five stories has a story of its own: a historical and cultural context, a literary legacy, influences from beliefs of all kinds (orthodox and heterod…