Welcome to Direct Article:
a collection of articles about history and some information on their authors.
First, an introduction....
This website was conceived two years ago in 2006 as a place to display some obscure
photographs and information which Greg King and I own on the Russian
imperial lodge at Bialowieza in Poland. The building, a marvel of
late Victorian modernity, no longer exists and until recently was
largely ignored by western historians. Some of the information
which appears here is not to be found in any other book or
magazine or on any other website, and we think it of unique interest to
people who range from architectural or social historians to those
fascinated with the last Tsar and his family.
From this beginning, the website grew conceptually into a place where friends and associates of ours might also host their work, ranging from reprints providing a "taster" of the magazines in which they first appeared (some of which no longer offer reprints at all), to additional information edited out of published articles due to space constraints, to entire new articles and book reviews. Increasingly, there is background information on the commercially published books or other projects of those who contribute their work here. In total, we are: Janet Ashton, Gretchen Haskin, Greg King, William Lee, Ilana Miller, Katrina Warne and Sue Woolmans, plus three guest authors. Many of us know each other to some degree; several are intimately involved in one another's work, and we hope that our projects and our holidays will continue to produce high quality material we can put up here for you to enjoy.
Since it went onto the internet in January 2007, Directarticle has been updated seven times, and now hosts sixteen reprinted articles (thirteen of them available only here), four reprints of otherwise-unavailable book reviews, twelve original articles and two original book reviews, as well as a "virtual library" of useful links and a noticeboard with news relevant to the site and its authors.
In order to mount this obscure new information, it was necessary to put
it into context by partially rewriting an article on the Polish hunting lodges which we did for "Royalty
Digest Quarterly" in 2006, where we also made use of much new material,
adding to that which Greg used in "The Court of the last Tsar,"
published the same year. This site builds still further on both
previous publications.
From this beginning, the website grew conceptually into a place where friends and associates of ours might also host their work, ranging from reprints providing a "taster" of the magazines in which they first appeared (some of which no longer offer reprints at all), to additional information edited out of published articles due to space constraints, to entire new articles and book reviews. Increasingly, there is background information on the commercially published books or other projects of those who contribute their work here. In total, we are: Janet Ashton, Gretchen Haskin, Greg King, William Lee, Ilana Miller, Katrina Warne and Sue Woolmans, plus three guest authors. Many of us know each other to some degree; several are intimately involved in one another's work, and we hope that our projects and our holidays will continue to produce high quality material we can put up here for you to enjoy.
Since it went onto the internet in January 2007, Directarticle has been updated seven times, and now hosts sixteen reprinted articles (thirteen of them available only here), four reprints of otherwise-unavailable book reviews, twelve original articles and two original book reviews, as well as a "virtual library" of useful links and a noticeboard with news relevant to the site and its authors.
There are a few obvious themes to our work: most of us are or have been interested in
Russian history to some extent; several write on royalty (which is
not to say that all are ardent royalists of course!); most of us are
very into architecture and travel. But we may of course put up work which has nothing to do with any
of those themes. We just hope that you like it all and continue to visit the site regularly.
Please enter our castle in the air.....
Janet Ashton
(page updated, April 2008)
[the views on this page are of Tarasp in Switzerland and Cragside House]