Their trunks were as tall and straight as ship masts. Who knows how old they were, but I'm guessing they were planted when the house was built in the 1920s. By the time I was a boy, their tops towered high above the roof. We played endlessly beneath the cover of these pines, twirling madly on a single rope swing attached to one especially formidable branch.
The fascination for all things Middle Eastern was part of a larger art and design philosophy known as the Aesthetic Movement. It began with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of the 1850s, grew to encompass William Morris and fellow designers and artists, evolved into the British Arts and Crafts movement, and ended with Art Nouveau in the first decades of the 20th century. The Aesthetic Movement began in Great Britain, but soon spread to other parts of Europe
The peasantry, working classes, middle classes, and nationalist movements sought fundamental change to issues such as land redistribution, workers' rights, and political representation. Although the tsar survived the first Russian Revolution of 1905, his failure to realise his promises of reform led to a second revolution in March 1917 and the obligation to abdicate. A third revolution in November 1917,