Latest news with #1917
Washington Post
a day ago
- General
- Washington Post
In 1917, a U.S. submarine sank in the fog. Experts just got detailed images.
The captain of the F-1 submarine later testified that, in the fog, he didn't see the oncoming vessel until the last second. Someone yelled to close the main deck hatch. But it was too late. The other boat rammed the F-1 and cut a huge gash in its side. It was Dec. 17, 1917. Up in the conning tower, sailors heard the loud whoosh of air being forced out as their sub filled with seawater. The five men topside were thrown into the ocean and later rescued.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Three Revolutions by Simon Hall review – how Russia, China and Cuba changed forever
If the word 'revolution' implies, etymologically, a world turned around, then what unfolded in Russia in 1917 was just that. Everything changed. Old-school deference was dead; the proletariat was in power. The communist American journalist John Reed witnessed a contretemps that captured the suddenness of the change. In simpler times, sailors would have yielded to senior ministers, but on the day of the storming of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, they weren't having it. When, in a last-ditch effort to save the Provisional Government, two liberal grandees demanded that they be let in, one of the sailors replied, 'We will spank you! And if necessary we will shoot you too. Go home now, and leave us in peace!' Here was an anecdote confirming Trotsky's lofty pronouncement that the revolution marked the 'forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership'. Where Trotsky was coolly detached in his bird's-eye The History of the Russian Revolution, Reed was breathless in his wide-eyed, worm's-eye memoir, Ten Days that Shook the World. Reed had the zeal of the convert. Born into a pig-iron fortune in Oregon, he rebelled against his preppy upbringing by embracing the bohemia of Greenwich Village: 'delicatessens, bookshops, art studios and saloons, its long-haired men and short-haired women.' Thereafter, he was fired up by the silk weavers' strike in New Jersey in 1913. Four years later, a sense of adventure and a folie à deux with his socialist wife Louise Bryant took them to Saint Petersburg (then Petrograd), where they witnessed the revolution's great set pieces first-hand. Warren Beatty's portrayal of him as a true believer in the biopic Reds, leafleting and dodging bullets, got him down to a tee. So it was hardly surprising that he was faced with sedition charges on his return. He was indicted for violating the Espionage Act for inveighing against American entry into the First World War. Hounded out of his homeland, he fled to Russia and died of typhus, aged 32; no medicines were available on account of the Western blockade of the Russian Civil War. Reed's is one of six lives served up by historian Simon Hall in his new book. Three of them are revolutionaries – Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro – and three are American journalists who filed stories from the frontlines of the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions, respectively: Reed, Edgar Snow and Herbert Matthews. These are unexpected pairings, chosen, one presumes, for their convenience in enabling Hall to reconstruct his three very foreign societies with the help of a largely monoglot bibliography. The conceit is to chronicle the journeys that represented turning points in 20th-century history. In Lenin's case, it was his return to Russia from Swiss exile in April 1917. Something of a party pooper, he maintained that the February Revolution that overthrew the tsar wasn't the real deal. In good time, his comrades came around, and that's how we got the Russian Revolution. In China, meanwhile, the Long March of 1934-5 was a desperate retreat. It was also a lesson in geography and endurance. On the run from the nationalist Kuomintang party's Chiang Kai-shek, who was working with Hitler's general Hans von Seeckt, some 90,000 troops and persecuted communists made the 9,000km trek from the Jiangxi Soviet in the south to Yan'an in the north. Only about 6,000 survived, and Mao emerged as their leader. For his part, Castro returned to Cuba from Mexico in 1956 aboard the Granma, 'a creaking, leaking leisure yacht'. As one compañero put it, it was not so much a landing as a shipwreck. Not all of them managed to negotiate the mangrove thickets of Playa Las Coloradas and Fulgencio Batista's strafing planes, but Castro did. Three years later, he toppled the dictator. Hall's tired trot through the three coups is less interesting than the three scoops he describes. Besides Reed's, we have the midwestern ad man turned journalist Edgar Snow's. He spent four months swimming and playing tennis with Mao's guerrillas in Bao'an, writing up the experience gushingly in Red Star Over China. Zhou Enlai, wrote Snow, was 'every inch an intellectual', Mao a 'gaunt, rather Lincolnesque figure', and the comrades 'the freest and happiest Chinese I had known'. Hall says that Red Star Over China was 'no crass work of propaganda'. But it was. Snow would have known about Mao's purges in the Jiangxi Soviet from 1931-36, in which, it was later revealed, 700,000 people perished. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Herbert Matthews of the New York Times was equally starstruck by his subject. Here he is on Castro, whom he met in the Sierra Maestra mountains in 1957: 'This was quite a man – a powerful six-footer, olive-skinned, full-faced with a straggly beard.' What's more, Castro was 'not only not Communist but decidedly anti-Communist'. Matthews's dispatches went a long way in swaying American opinion against Batista's dictatorship, but needless to say, some of the more confident pronouncements about Castro's politics aged badly. Hall's potted narratives trundle along, absorbing rich period and cultural details. His strengths lie in storytelling, not history-writing, which is to say he is more at home with description than analysis. But there lies the rub. Unlike Reed, Snow, and Matthews, he is writing at one remove. This necessitates extensive quotation and, worse, lengthy paraphrases that are inevitably weaker than the lapidary originals. Three Revolutions: Russia, China, Cuba and the Epic Journeys that Changed the World by Simon Hall is published by Faber (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Three Revolutions by Simon Hall review – Stories from the frontlines of revolution
If the word 'revolution' implies, etymologically, a world turned around, then what unfolded in Russia in 1917 was just that. Everything changed. Old-school deference was dead; the proletariat was in power. The communist American journalist John Reed witnessed a contretemps that captured the suddenness of the change. In simpler times, sailors would have yielded to senior ministers, but on the day of the storming of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, they weren't having it. When, in a last-ditch effort to save the Provisional Government, two liberal grandees demanded that they be let in, one of the sailors replied, 'We will spank you! And if necessary we will shoot you too. Go home now, and leave us in peace!' Here was an anecdote confirming Trotsky's lofty pronouncement that the revolution marked the 'forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership'. Where Trotsky was coolly detached in his bird's-eye The History of the Russian Revolution, Reed was breathless in his wide-eyed, worm's-eye memoir, Ten Days that Shook the World. Reed had the zeal of the convert. Born into a pig-iron fortune in Oregon, he rebelled against his preppy upbringing by embracing the bohemia of Greenwich Village: 'delicatessens, bookshops, art studios and saloons, its long-haired men and short-haired women.' Thereafter, he was fired up by the silk weavers' strike in New Jersey in 1913. Four years later, a sense of adventure and a folie à deux with his socialist wife Louise Bryant took them to Saint Petersburg (then Petrograd), where they witnessed the revolution's great set pieces first-hand. Warren Beatty's portrayal of him as a true believer in the biopic Reds, leafleting and dodging bullets, got him down to a tee. So it was hardly surprising that he was faced with sedition charges on his return. He was indicted for violating the Espionage Act for inveighing against American entry into the First World War. Hounded out of his homeland, he fled to Russia and died of typhus, aged 32; no medicines were available on account of the Western blockade of the Russian Civil War. Reed's is one of six lives served up by historian Simon Hall in his new book. Three of them are revolutionaries – Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro – and three are American journalists who filed stories from the frontlines of the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions, respectively: Reed, Edgar Snow and Herbert Matthews. These are unexpected pairings, chosen, one presumes, for their convenience in enabling Hall to reconstruct his three very foreign societies with the help of a largely monoglot bibliography. The conceit is to chronicle the journeys that represented turning points in 20th-century history. In Lenin's case, it was his return to Russia from Swiss exile in April 1917. Something of a party pooper, he maintained that the February Revolution that overthrew the tsar wasn't the real deal. In good time, his comrades came around, and that's how we got the Russian Revolution. In China, meanwhile, the Long March of 1934-5 was a desperate retreat. It was also a lesson in geography and endurance. On the run from the nationalist Kuomintang party's Chiang Kai-shek, who was working with Hitler's general Hans von Seeckt, some 90,000 troops and persecuted communists made the 9,000km trek from the Jiangxi Soviet in the south to Yan'an in the north. Only about 6,000 survived, and Mao emerged as their leader. For his part, Castro returned to Cuba from Mexico in 1956 aboard the Granma, 'a creaking, leaking leisure yacht'. As one compañero put it, it was not so much a landing as a shipwreck. Not all of them managed to negotiate the mangrove thickets of Playa Las Coloradas and Fulgencio Batista's strafing planes, but Castro did. Three years later, he toppled the dictator. Hall's tired trot through the three coups is less interesting than the three scoops he describes. Besides Reed's, we have the midwestern ad man turned journalist Edgar Snow's. He spent four months swimming and playing tennis with Mao's guerrillas in Bao'an, writing up the experience gushingly in Red Star Over China. Zhou Enlai, wrote Snow, was 'every inch an intellectual', Mao a 'gaunt, rather Lincolnesque figure', and the comrades 'the freest and happiest Chinese I had known'. Hall says that Red Star Over China was 'no crass work of propaganda'. But it was. Snow would have known about Mao's purges in the Jiangxi Soviet from 1931-36, in which, it was later revealed, 700,000 people perished. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Herbert Matthews of the New York Times was equally starstruck by his subject. Here he is on Castro, whom he met in the Sierra Maestra mountains in 1957: 'This was quite a man – a powerful six-footer, olive-skinned, full-faced with a straggly beard.' What's more, Castro was 'not only not Communist but decidedly anti-Communist'. Matthews's dispatches went a long way in swaying American opinion against Batista's dictatorship, but needless to say, some of the more confident pronouncements about Castro's politics aged badly. Hall's potted narratives trundle along, absorbing rich period and cultural details. His strengths lie in storytelling, not history-writing, which is to say he is more at home with description than analysis. But there lies the rub. Unlike Reed, Snow, and Matthews, he is writing at one remove. This necessitates extensive quotation and, worse, lengthy paraphrases that are inevitably weaker than the lapidary originals. Three Revolutions: Russia, China, Cuba and the Epic Journeys that Changed the World by Simon Hall is published by Faber (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
A sprinkling of sublime for TE Lawrence's grave
There is that 'great man' moment in David Lean's cinematic masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia when Peter O'Toole's Lawrence is trying to persuade his sceptical Bedouin lieutenant (Omar Sharif) that it is indeed possible to cross hundreds of miles of waterless desert and take the fortified port of Aqaba, held by the Turks, from the landward side. 'Aqaba is over there,' he says, pointing into the furnace. 'It's only a matter of going.' That journey in 1917, the crossing of the uncrossable, of what Sharif's character calls the 'Devil's Anvil', was the defining moment for Thomas Edward Lawrence. His legend grew from life ended not with a Turkish bullet or a last drop of stagnant water but at the age of 46 with a
Daily Record
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Hit shows and films leaving Netflix next month from huge rom-com to 90s classic
Netflix UK is set to lose a plethora of movies and TV shows in May 2025, with acclaimed titles like 1917, Hidden Figures and Zero Dark Thirty all leaving the platform Netflix UK is set to bid farewell to a significant number of titles from its vast library, with numerous films and TV shows leaving the streaming service in May. Viewers only have a few days left to watch critically acclaimed blockbusters such as Hidden Figures, Legends of the Fall, 1917, and Zero Dark Thirty, as well as commercially successful hits like Jumanji: The Next Level and Penguins of Madagascar: The Movie, on Netflix before they depart from the platform. Netflix Originals including Earth Playlist, Get in, and Inhuman Resources, will also cease streaming on the OTT platform this May. With an impressive 93 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes, Hidden Figures recounts the extraordinary true story of three African American women - computer genius Dorothy Vaughan, mathematician Katherine Johnson, and engineer Mary Jackson - who defied the odds to become key figures at NASA during the crucial years of the space race in the 1960s. The highly praised Oscar-nominated film will be leaving Netflix on May 1. Featuring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, James Gandolfini, and Kyle Chandler, Zero Dark Thirty details the frustrating hunt, subsequent capture, and ( spoiler ) eventual death of al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. The Academy Award-winning movie will stop streaming on Netflix from May 16. John Krasinski's 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is set to leave Netflix UK on May 15, along with children's favourite, Peppa Pig: My First Cinema Experience. The final day to catch Netflix Originals Earth Playlist and the French-language thriller, Get In, is April 30, reports the Mirror. Here's what's leaving Netflix UK in May 2025: May 1: 1917 (2019) The 5th Wave (2016) A Man Wanted (2017) The Adolf Eichmann Trial (2011) All We Had (2016) Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher (2013) Big Fat Liar (2002) The Bronze (2002) Calais, the End of the Jungle (2017) The Death of Stalin (2017) Diana (2013) Earth Playlist (Season 1) Netflix Original Emma's Chance (2016) Escorts (2015) From Russia with Cash (2015) Fury (2014) Get In (2019) Netflix Original Hatton Garden (Season 1) Hidden Figures (2016) Legally High (2013) Legends of the Fall (1994) Life (2017) Maggie's Plan (2015) Masterminds (2016) The Mauritanian (2021) Mission: Joy – Finding Happiness in Troubled Times (2021) Murder in Successville (2017) O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000) The Paedophile Hunter (2014) Penelope (2006) Pixels (2015) The Possession of Hannah Grace (2018) Proud Mary (2018) Psych (2014) Rough Night (2017) Sleepless (2017) Terror at the Mall (2014) Three Days of Terror: The Charlie Hebdo Attack (2016) The Throwaways (2015) May 2: 24 Hours in Tesco (2023) May 4: Family Blood (2018) Jumanji: The Next Level (2019) The Last Witch Hunter (2015) Luccas Neto In: Summer Camp 2 (2020) May 6: Brother in Love 2 (2021) Like a Rolling Stone: The Life & Times of Ben Fong-Torres (2022) Si, Mi Amor (2020) May 7: A Drop of Blood (2016) Emergency Travel (2019) Red Card (2017) Ride Along (2014) Ride Along 2 (2016) Si Doel the Movie 2 (2019) Waking Ned (1998) May 8: Alita: Battle Angel (2019) The Hitman's Apprentice (2012) May 12: Baby Ruby (2022) May 13: Bigger Than Africa (2018) Journey of an African Colony (2018) May 14: Dilan 1991 (2019) The Heroic Legend of Arslan (2015) May 15: 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016) Confess, Fletch (2022) Crossroads (2002) Inhuman Resources (2020) Netflix Original Murphy's Law (2007) Peppa Pig: My First Cinema Experience (2017) Ready or Not (2019) May 16:
