Not medieval alert: I’m off to a screening today of the first two episodes of ‘The Pacific’. This is the Hanks/Spielberg follow-up to the peerless ‘Band of Brothers’, which followed Easy Company, (part of the American 101st Airborne Division ) from the Normandy landings in June 1944 to the fall of Berlin. I confess I am unnaturally excited. The Pacific shifts the story to the eastern theatre. This part of the war doesn’t get taught or talked about half as much as events in Europe, perhaps because conditions were even more dreadful, the fighting perhaps more barbaric and the human cruelty at least as grotesque. Will this translate into good television? Spielberg, Hanks and HBO have form, so I suspect it will. Will it be easy viewing? I doubt it.
Boyd Tonkin at the Independent thought that the recent paperback edition of Summer of Blood was a ’swift and thrilling close-up history of the Peasants’ Revolt’. You can read his generous review here.
A rather entertaining piece here from the Times, reporting on an article in the International Journal of Obesity. Apparently, artists’ representations of the fare on offer at the Last Supper have been getting steadily bigger since the later Middle Ages.
Here’s a link to my lead review from this week’s Spectator. I discuss three recent books about Sir Winston Churchill, attempting to get to grips with his views on Empire (’I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire’) and race (’I hate people with slit eyes and pig-tails’), as well as his attitudes towards standing up (best avoided) and his mother’s predilection for ‘dinner or tea or sex’ with members of the royal family.
An online skirmish over article attribution on Medievalists.net is examined here. It’s an argument over the protocol, courtesy and ethics of blogging, rather than a row about history, but it’s worth reading, if only to see an academic use the word ‘ridonkulousness’ (second par).
Here’s fun. Why not pimp the Bayeux Tapestry? Proper nerd fun. You can reinvent history by dragging and dropping soldiers, kings, beast, buildings and boats into the most unlikely combinations, adding text to move your story along etc etc. I made a loose six-frame mashup riffing on William the Bastard’s invasion of England in 1066, Lemuel Gulliver’s visit to the Houyhnhnms, and this morning’s breakfast. It was quite fun. I can’t get the Gallery to work at the moment or I’d post a screengrab. But go, see this masterpiece of the Internet age for yourself…
I had the pleasure last night of attending the first concert presented by the Lux Aeterna Project at King’s College Chapel in London. It was a showcase for some rather beautiful contemporary classical music, both well known and original. The medieval link? There’s not one, really, although the opening rendition of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’ had obvious roots in the sixteenth century. Still not very medieval, but wonderful all the same, and I heartily implore you to check out the Lux Aeterna web site, here.
@NoelClarke true, but on the other hand, managers have done a lot of very strange and silly things. and the media is fans' main practical... in reply to NoelClarke3 weeks ago
