Marionette: a puppet controlled from above using wires or strings. The term used to distinguish theatre of this nature from other forms such as finger, glove, and shadow puppetry and is derived from ‘little Mary’ - one of the first figures to be made into a marionette was the Virgin Mary. A marionette’s puppeteer is called a manipulator. Puppets performances, although already popular in the early 1600s, became the primary theatrical medium in England in 1642. When Cromwell and the Puritans governed the Commonwealth, theatre doors were locked tight. The marionettes kept playing because they did not seem important enough to ban. From 1642 until a couple of years after Cromwell’s death in 1658, puppet theatre was the only public entertainment on offer. See www.currentmiddleages.org/artsci/docs/Champ_Bane_Marionette.pdf.
Tarantass: a low-slung, four-wheeled carriage, common in Russia and also found in other parts of eastern Europe.
Rusalka: this translates as a female ghost, associated with the unquiet dead who died violently
Oracle at Delphi. From wikispaces: ‘Oracles were believed to have unique access to the gods of a particular religion and through this access were often able to see into the future. The most revered oracle in ancient Greece was located at the town of Delphi in the temple of Apollo, the god of prophecy. The prestige of this oracle made Delphi the most important, influential, and wealthy sacred place in the entire Greek world.
For at least a thousand years, the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle offered divine guidance on issues ranging from the founding of colonies to declarations of war, as well as advice on personal issues. Rulers of Greece, Persia, and the Roman Empire made the arduous journey to this mountainous site.’
See http://farrington1600.wikispaces.com/file/view/DelphicOracle.pdf
Edith Durham. In the Mystery of Einstein’s Daughter Miss Durham is found happily painting in Serbia. In real life, she was considered the century’s prime interpreter of Albania. According to Charles King (Times Literary Supplement, 4 August 2000, pp. 13-14) she was ‘the most important writer on that culture since J. C. Hobhouse journeyed through the Albanian lands with Byron.’ She was adored among the Albanians themselves, who knew her as Kralica e Malësorevet - the Queen of the Highlanders.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: the Brothers Grimm were nineteenth century German nationalists, who used their academic and linguistic skills to travel through ‘Germany’ (then more a geographical than a political state term), collecting folk tales to show the cultural unity of Germany. From their tales, we have such stories as Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin and Snow White.
The Pig War: also known as the Customs War, this was an economic conflict which really did take place between the Habsburg Empire and the Kingdom of Serbia in 1906-1909, in which the Habsburgs imposed a customs blockade on Serbian pork. The conflict was crucial in escalating tensions between the two sides in the early twentieth century, running up to the decision of the Habsburg Empire on a final (and ultimately unsuccessful) military strike at Serbia in 1914, leading to the assassination at Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the overt cause of World War I.
The Edalji case. George Edalji was a half-British, half-Indian lawyer solicitor from the West Midlands who became world-famous in 1907 when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle campaigned to have him declared innocent of maliciously mutilating a pony. Edalji was of Parsee heritage on his father’s side. It was partially as a result of this case that the Court of Criminal Appeal was established in 1907, so Conan Doyle not only proved Edalji innocent, his work helped establish a way to correct other miscarriages of justice. It is discussed in Crime News in Modern Britain by Judith Rowbotham, Kim Stevenson and Samantha Pegg. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Verlaine, Paul: Verlaine was a French poet, writing at the end of the nineteenth century (he died in 1896). He is most strongly associated with the Symbolist movement. His poetry (as well as his lifestyle) was considered ‘decadent’. Towards the end of his life he converted to Roman Catholicism. By the 1890s he was considered the ‘Prince of Poets’ by his French peers.
In bocca un lupo! - Italian for good luck.
‘Si non è vero, è ben trovato.’ ‘(Even) if it isn’t true, it’s well contrived.’
Enceinte. Even as late as the 1930s the respectable remnants of Victorian England considered it vulgar to use the word ‘pregnant’, and enceinte was preferred in polite circles.
Three-Body Problem. The challenge in taking a set of data that specifies the positions, masses and velocities of three bodies and determining the motions of those bodies. Historically, the first specific three-body problem to receive extended study involved the Moon, Earth and Sun.
Love Letters between Mileva and Albert Einstein. Though those included in this tale were composed for the purpose, there are surviving letters between the two which permits the use of this narrative device as a key element in the plot. The surviving letters are now in the Albert Einstein Archives, Edmund J Safra Campus, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
Singer Sargent, John. An American artist, hugely popular in the Edwardian period, he completed the oil A Parisian Beggar-Girl in 1880 in the Realism style. A favourite model of his, Carmela Bertagna, was probably the sitter. In 1910 Sargent did paint a waterfall, probably in the Tyroclass="underline"
1905: this was the year which saw Einstein’s invention of the mass-energy equation in its original form L=mV² (he rewrote it as E=MC² in a 1907 paper). 1905 was to become known in Physics as Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis, like Isaac Newton’s Annus Mirabilis of 1666. Launching Special Relativity on a startled world did not bring the 26-year-old Einstein instant fame and certainly not wealth because of lack of proof to satisfy the many Doubting Thomases, including the Nobel Committee. Among scientists, with two or three exceptions such as Max Planck and H.A. Lorentz, the remarkable papers Einstein rolled out during the year, especially the two concerning Special Theory, roused long-lived opposition, even hostility, especially among many of the Elders of the European scientific Establishment, not just among paid-up members of the ‘Anti-Relativity Company’ such as the German anti-Semites Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark who loathed ‘Jewish Physics’. Einstein’s Special Theory, later known as Special Relativity, would not be confirmed until well into the 1930s.Eventually Relativity became one of the two pillars of modern physics, alongside quantum mechanics. It is still a source of wonderment that the 26-year-old Albert Einstein produced such astounding theories. Hermann Minkowski was Einstein’s maths professor at the Zurich Polytechnic, later a professor at Göttingen. He told professional colleagues, ‘I really wouldn’t have thought Einstein capable’ of such work.