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.
On Tuesday morning I went along to the press viewing for the Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey exhibition at the National Gallery, which opened yesterday.
It’s a decent exhibition, although one can see why Delaroche was out of fashion for so long. His sentimental, even mawkish renderings of great moments from Tudor and Stuart history manage to be both gruesome and twee, often at the same stroke.
The exhibition centres around his portrayal of the execution of Lady Jane Grey. Much wailing from the ladies-in-waiting; compare and contrast with the ambivalence of the axeman, who stands impassive, as though it were not an act of human cruelty he were about to commit, but a pre-determined act demanded by a higher power. Delaroche has layed on the pathos in spades by having a blindfolded Lady Jane grope helplessly for the block - you have both weepy sentimentality and a sort of grotesque historical determinism in the same canvas.
This is the model for most of the major works on show. The Princes in the Tower tremble before their murderer (represented only by a shadow under the door) while a pathetic little toy-dog yaps bravely but pointlessly at impending doom. Cromwell lifts the lid of a coffin to peer at the ashen face of Charles I’s corpse; everything about him is blood-red, to the point that it looks as though his very boots are brimming over with blood. There is a holiness to the dead King’s visage, but it hardly lights up the canvas - this is a painting literally coated in gore and cruelty.
Delaroche was, of course, a product of the French Revolution, so had seen his fair share of gore; this also contributed no doubt to the depressing inevitability of death in his major works. He is not a subtle painter, nor are his paintings especially demanding. Still, the exhibition is pretty well lit and certainly worth half an hour if you are loitering in Trafalgar Square. But as for Delaroche as the purpose of a day out? There’s not much to separate it from a quick squizz around The London Dungeon.
I have written in several places and at relatively great length of my admiration for Jonathan Sumption. (This is a scholarly admiration, and I have no opinion to publish here on his work as a silk.) I think this admiration has just been upgraded to green envy, on reading that he has a library of 7,000 medieval history books.
The provenance of that figure seems to be this Guardian profile from 10 years ago. In which case one would suspect that there are now another 1000 or so books on the shelf. If they are all on medieval history then it sounds like a magnificent collection indeed.
So. Episode 2 was a little better than the first. We had Henry II dying, betrayed and heartbroken, as his beloved Le Mans burned to the ground. Then we had Richard I giving Saladin’s heathen johnnies the right royal runaround in the Holy Land, then falling out with his ‘lover’ (never bought that, myself) Philip I of France and draining England of its gold in the process.
But this series is still pretty undercooked. The characters are too thin, and their motives painfully oversimplified. It’s not a subtle family drama, but it’s not a political thriller either. There are some infuriating tics: the habit of referring to the ‘King of Anjou and England’ has started to really get my goat.
And weirdest of all, this episode was narrated by a breathy, almost orgasmic Eleanor of Aquitaine, who seemed to be auditioning for a job doing the next batch of M&S food ads. It right gave me goose-bumps, and not in a good way.
'Plantagenet' on BBC Radio 4: Episode 2
So. Episode 2 was a little better than the first. We had Henry II dying, betrayed and heartbroken, as his beloved Le Mans burned to the ground. Then we had Richard I giving Saladin’s heathen johnnies the right royal runaround in the Holy Land, then falling out with his ‘lover’ (never bought that, myself) Philip I of France and draining England of its gold in the process.
But this series is still pretty undercooked. The characters are too thin, and their motives painfully oversimplified. It’s not a subtle family drama, but it’s not a political thriller either. There are some infuriating tics: the habit of referring to the ‘King of Anjou and England’ has started to really get my goat.
And weirdest of all, this episode was narrated by a breathy, almost orgasmic Eleanor of Aquitaine, who seemed to be auditioning for a job doing the next batch of M&S food ads. It right gave me goose-bumps, and not in a good way.
Sigh.