Hallie Rubenhold

Transport to Australia was the saving of Carmen Callil’s family

In Oh Happy Day! Callil reveals how one forebear made a small fortune after being banished from Georgian England for stealing hemp

Convicts set sail from Britain to Australia. Credit: Getty Images
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  • Oh Happy Day! Those Times and These Times

    Carmen Callil

    Cape, pp. 368, £18

If 2020 has given us something to talk about other than Covid, it’s been history — and, more precisely, to whom history belongs and how we’ve chosen to define it. Well into the modern era, the philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s definition of the subject as ‘the biography of great men’, seems to endure.

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Sam Leith

Stop sending Christmas cards! 

Sam Leith
Christmas cards are the pits, aren’t they? A positive engine of seasonal ill-will. They take hours to do, if you do them properly, and wing across the country (and have you checked the price of a stamp lately?) to be received by people you like but don’t see, or people you see but don’t like

Because you read about australia

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