Kevin Brown

Read the book … and book the author as your speaker Kevin Brown, “Titanic: Ship of Lost Illusions” (2025) pen-and-sword.co.uk/Titanic-… Or choose from his wide repertoire of talks on the history of medicine Black tie on request, white tie if you insist or less formal as you prefer

An amazing night sky with a lunar corona & cloud iridescence - scientifically interesting but more appealing aesthetically as almost a work of abstract art. Awesome!

Classical Roman archaeology, be it on Hadrian’s Wall, York, Hadrian’s Villa, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Salona or in Rome itself has fascinated me for over 50 years, combined with a love of Latin literature since I first read it in the original: archaeologist in an alternative life?

It is a bit of an in-joke that a writer & an archivist who studied palaeography in the traditional manner should choose to wear a Croata heritage tie featuring the 9th century rounded Glagolitic script letter Ž or Živěte (Ⰶ) meaning to live, symbolising vitality, life & creation

Somehow a meal always seems healthier and more relaxed when eaten al fresco on a sunny day watching the world go by like Trogir locals

“Slavs who are quarreling … draw all the energy out of the air by the passion of their debate, so that anything outside its orbit can only flutter trivially.” (Rebecca West). Written in 1941, true of the Second World War in Yugoslavia & the 1990s Croatian War of the Homeland

“When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.” (William Wordsworth). The enigma of solitude is as strong as ever.

How right Herman Melville was when he wrote that “meditation and water are wedded for ever.” Gazing out to sea calms and focuses thought and inner vision.

Chance connections for a St Mary’s doctor who on a cruise around the Adriatic in 1926 met a hospitable Croatian Count Antun Pavlovic in Split only to find that his Serbian son-in-law Djura Dimitrijevic, a naval doctor, had studied at St Mary’s funded by the Serbian Relief Fund

A day of visiting new places, light reading, a seafood meal & a night at the ballet offer some much needed rest & relaxation - an escape from the stresses of life

The ballet “Grk Zorba” (“Zorba the Greek”), a tale of resilience & bonding, with the music of Mike’s Theodorakis & choreography of Staša Zurovac, culminating in the iconic Sirtaki dance, makes for an entertaining evening

“My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich & modest, but asserted by a simple pin (They will say ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)” TS Elliot saw the social anxiety & assertion of status beneath the formal elegance of the impeccable morning suit

Once leisure wear: lounge suit of “Bohemian character especially acceptable for sporting purposes" (Tailor & Cutter 1897), dinner jacket for "informal evening occasions'' (Harpers Bazaar 1900) & “the putting on of a smoking jacket suggests relaxation to a man" (WM Webb, 1907).

“My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich & modest, but asserted by a simple pin (They will say ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)” TS Elliot saw the social anxiety & assertion of status beneath the formal elegance of the impeccable morning suit

Symbol of success, sophistication & status or of power, control & oppression, self-expression or social conformity, the cravat or tie was Croatia’s contribution to an enduring fashionable accessory from its origin in the dashing neckwear of Louis XIV’s brave & brutal mercenaries

“A spruce young man, with a felt hat perched at a proper angle on his crenellated hair & a well-cut lounge suit, it seemed strange that he should show the face that the inhabitants of regions long vexed by ungenial history wear in times of crisis” (Black Lamb & Grey Falcon, 1941)

Dalmatians “evicted… into the open day, neat & slick & uniform, taking to modern clothes & manners with the adaptability of oil.. set apart for ever by the arcana of language & thoughts they learned to share while they scurried for generations close-pressed through the darkness”

Rebecca West observed “men of the quick & whippy & secret kind we had seen when we first entered Split, descendants of those who had lived through the angry centuries the lives of rats & mice in the walls of Diocletian’s palace” whose debate “united them on a platform of heroism”

To Rebecca West Split “recalls Naples because it also is a tragic & architecturally magnificent sausage machine where a harried people of mixed race have been forced by history to run for centuries through the walls & cellars & sewers of ruined palaces” (Black Lamb & Grey Falcon)