Cassandra complex | The Spectator

Maine character syndrome

When I arrive at the Longfellow Hotel in Portland, Maine, the weather is as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described it: “Into each life some rain must fall/ Some days must be dark and dreary.” In his childhood home, I stand in the “rainy day” room, where Longfellow is believed to have written those words in 1841. A portrait of his sister Anne hangs on the wall. She was a caring soul, who helped hold family life together while her brother became a celebrated poet. His portable writing desk is on display, complete with white quill. The first poem he published, aged 13, was written in this house. Six years later, he sailed to Europe. His early travel sketches appeared in the New England Magazine, while his observations of European life were brought together in Outre-Mer and Hyperion.

Charles Cornish-Dale

How the White House fell for the ‘Living Diet’

For the ancient Greeks, it was the shapely buttocks of the famous statue of Aphrodite kallipygos – literally “Aphrodite of the beautiful arse.” The female ideal also included small, pert breasts, pale skin indicative of leisure indoors, away from the sun, and fair reddish or blonde hair. The male ideal, by contrast, was that of the athlete, the body shaped by training in the gymnasium and the wrestling school (palaestra) for competition and, ultimately, war. Defined but not excessive musculature; broad shoulders and narrow waist; tanned skin glistening with olive oil and exfoliated by the scraping of a bronze strigil. And we know the Greeks preferred dainty genitals too – at least in art – as a sign of masculine continence and self-control.

Hannah Moore

Why sauerkraut was a savior for sailors

In the late 18th century, scurvy was killing around 50 percent of British mariners on long-haul journeys – more than shipwrecks, battles and all other diseases combined. Between 1500 and 1800, the illness had claimed roughly two million sailors’ lives. On the disastrous 1740 expedition around Cape Horn led by Commodore George Anson, of the 1,854 men who departed, only 188 returned. The vast majority had died from scurvy. By the mid-18th century, the Royal Navy was desperate for a remedy. They noticed that, contrary to their struggles, the Dutch were losing hardly any men to the illness.

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