British Library blogs

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These blogs express the thoughts and opinions of individual British Library staff members. You can subscribe to any blog by email.

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Musgrave at 89

27 May 2017 Music

Today (27 May 2017) is the eighty-ninth birthday of the Scottish-American composer Thea Musgrave, born in Barnton, Midlothian, but, since the mid-1970s, resident in the USA. Following a major purchase in 2009, with assistance from the Eccles Centre for American...

The first British ‘blues boom’ - and the reception of African American music and dance in 1920s Britain

26 May 2017 Sound and vision

British Library VOC/1923/GILBERT Guest blog by Lawrence Davies, current Edison Fellow and PhD student at King’s College London. Lawrence has contributed a chapter on British Blues to a forthcoming volume of the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World...

Commemorating Russia’s last coronation

26 May 2017 European studies

On 26 May 1896 (14 May old style) Nicholas II was crowned ‘Tsar of all the Russias’ in the Cathedral of the Dormition in Moscow. Nicholas had acceded to the throne in November 1894, on the death of his father...

Slave, scholar, stoic

26 May 2017 Medieval manuscripts

‘Some things are in our control and others are not … the latter should be nothing to you.’ This wise statement begins the Enchiridion of Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher. Epictetus had some experience of hardships being out of his control:...