Opus – Page 96 – Encyclopædia of the sublime

Julian MacLaren-Ross

Julian Maclaren-Ross fitted the profile of a Soho flaneur. The story of his career is one of a spiralling descent, and his biographer Paul Willets described him as “the mediocre caretaker of his own immense talent”. In Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Music Of Time he’s lightly fictionalised as a novelist. Careless, feckless, cripplingly impractical, he squandered his grand ability, the talent to write. Always the dandy, with his waved hair, elegant overcoat, and silver-topped Malacca cane, and an effortlessly riveting raconteur, his shambolic life of short-leash rootlessness tacked around the fringes of the literary establishment, involving permanent insolvency and occasional bouts of homelessness.

Marine chronometers

Marine chronometers are precise, specialized clocks for finding longitude at sea.

Sümela Monastery

The Sümela Monastery stands at the foot of a steep cliff facing the Altındere valley in Turkey. Legend has it that two priests undertook the founding of the monastery on the site after having discovered a miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary in a cave on the mountain.

Peking to Paris Race

In 1907 five teams of intrepid motorists embarked upon the most grueling motor challenge at that time - to drive their cars in a run from Peking to Paris.

A Hero of Our Time

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov is a a psychologically probing portrait of a disillusioned 19th-century aristocrat. The novel is set in the Russian Caucasus in the 1830s. Grigory Pechorin is a bored, self-centered, and cynical young army officer who believes in nothing. With impunity he toys with the love of women and the goodwill of men.

Bruges-la-Morte

Bruges-la-Morte is a short novel by Georges Rodenbach, first published in 1892. It tells the story of a widower overcome with grief, who takes refuge in Bruges, where he becomes obsessed with a dancer he sees at the opera Robert le diable who is the exact likeness of his dead wife. The book is notable for its poetic evocation of the decaying city and for its innovative form.

Czeslaw Slania

Czeslaw Slania is one of the world's most prolific postage stamp and banknote engravers.

Project Iceworm

Project Iceworm was a top-secret US military project from the cold war. Powered, remarkably, by the world’s first mobile nuclear generator and known as “the city under the ice”, the camp’s three-kilometre network of tunnels, eight metres beneath the ice, housed laboratories, a shop, a hospital, a cinema, a chapel and accommodation for as many as 200 soldiers. Its personnel were officially stationed there to test Arctic construction methods and carry out research. Scientists based at the camp did, indeed, drill the first ice core samples ever used to study the earth’s climate, obtaining data still cited today. In reality, the camp served as cover for something altogether different. Project Iceworm, presented to the US chiefs of staff in 1960, aimed to use Camp Century’s frozen tunnels to test the feasibility of a huge launch site under the ice, close enough to fire nuclear missiles directly at the Soviet Union.

Archaeopteryx

Archaeopteryx is the earliest and most primitive bird known.

Spirograph

Spirograph is a geometric drawing toy.