More story than history

We like to begin the year with a film, but this year, it just wasn't possible.

Elder daughter took off for Hades in the middle of the afternoon, and we're bound to drift off in an evening screening, so we delayed our film until midday today - well, after the twenty-five minutes of car commercials, public service ads, reminders to turn off our cell-phones dove-tailed into cell-phone service provider ads, and oh yes, several trailers.

Our choice was The Favourite due to the cast, the premise, and the fact that it's likely to figure heavily in the Oscar nominations, if the Golden Globes nominations are anything to go by.

The Golden Globe nominations are, predictably, rather mystifying for this film. For one thing, it's been nominated under the "Best Comedy or Musical" category, even though what humour is in it is very dark. The soundtrack features baroque stuff, of course, with a rather strange ditty from Sir Elton John playing out over the illegible, but highly artistic credits. There's also a dance sequence that is so weird, I wondered if it might be a fantasy brought on by one of Queen Anne's ailments.

This brings us to the second thing: Olivia Coleman has been nominated for a Golden Globe as a lead for her role as Queen Anne of Great Britain (1665-1714; reigned 1702-1714); her costars Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone are nominated as "supporting roles" - in a film with a title that indicates the story is about them - each is a "favourite": Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, and her less fortunate cousin Abigail Hill (later Baroness Masham). This sort of thing seems to happen a lot with women's film roles, lead roles are interpreted as supporting roles, so they can be fitted into the categories.

At any rate, it's a strange film, but quite a beautiful one. The camera angles are sometimes folded into panoramic shots, or stretched into oval fish-eyes, with the shadows, highlights and shades of Vermeer paintings, lots of dark blues, black-and-whites. You can't find fault with the acting. It's the sort of film that makes me say inwardly, as I gaze on tastefully filmed scenes of royal lesbianism and bunnies (not in the same scenes): Goodness, I wonder what really happened?

Because it's a mistake to equate film-going with a history lesson.

Don't get me wrong; do go see it, and then find out how much is likely to be true. I suggest you start here - a web site entitled History Vs Hollywood, which, currently, provides historical context on about 200 recent movies, most of them made since 2000, although films such as Jaws and Schindler's List are included.

If you're like me, you'll want to check afterwards, not ahead of time, as facts do get in the way of a good story.

Why Persephone shouldn't be allowed near bookshops

This past summer, I made a pilgrim's stop at the one of the Holy Four Bookshops of Victoria. Then I came back a few times, for I had spotted my heart's desire.

The bookshop was Ivy's in Oak Bay*, conveniently close to one of my house-sits and perilously close for someone like me, who strives and fails to keep her luggage light for increasingly stringent airline requirements.

But, oh! It was Matthew Green's London: A Travel Guide Through Time, for which I'd longed since seeing it promoted on the London Historians Facebook page, and for which I'd been waiting to appear in paperback. I'm a sucker for the time-travel approach to history, having loved Ian Mortimer's A Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England and A Time
Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England.

What excited me about Matthew Green's book is that the focus is on London. I adore London Walks; I bullied elder daughter into taking several during her two recent trips to England. These six tours are a little bit like London Walks, except that they involve overnight stays in ancient London inns, and begin with a step through a wormhole in time -- Green starts each tour with the traveller standing at a point in modern London before moving through the layers of time to: 1603 London where Shakespeare's plays - and neighbouring bear fights - are packing 'em in on the South Bank; a relatively tiny London of 1390 where Richard II reigns; plague-ridden London of 1665, before the Great Fire; the many contradictory worlds of Victorian London in 1884, post-Blitz and pre-Cool 1957 London; and the coffee-house London of 1716.

If you love London and history (and gawd knows, I do), this is bliss. Matthew Green carefully immerses your senses, supplying not only visual details, but what you will hear, smell, feel, and taste - heaven help you. He also gives practical survival tips: best not to appear alien or foreign in Shakespearean London; find a white stick, and you will be given a wide berth by 17th century Londoners fearing the plague; and if you're a woman visiting an eighteenth century London coffee house, disguise yourself as a man, or be taken for a prostitute.

This is a book I will want to re-read several times - preferably with a map, as the maps provided aren't that helpful for anyone not intimately familiar with the city. I will also want to pick up the many details I missed the first time around, not to mention examine the end-notes and check out the recommended reading list.  And I will be thinking of the members of both my family and that of the Resident Fan Boy who made London their home in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

So, as you may have gathered, I snapped in the book shop, and gave into temptation.  And I didn't even get charged for overweight luggage.

 I put the book in my carry-on bag.

*The other three are Munro's Books, Russell Books, and Bolen Books.  Look them up!

Claiming London

Both the Resident Fan Boy and I have London roots, mine on my paternal side, his on three or four branches of his father's and at least one branch of his mother's.  This is probably why I find this video eerily beautiful.

 London first appears as a knot at the centre of the Thames, then bulges and spreads, surrounded by satellites of the farms and settlements that would become villages in Middlesex, Essex, Kent, and Surrey before morphing into Greater London neighbourhoods.


My husband's and my London ancestors first made their appearances in the city during the eighteenth century.  The earliest record for the RFB is the marriage of his Huguenot great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents in Blackfriars in 1717 - three years into the reign of George I,  when the music first changes in the video.  The earliest record of my ancestors in London is the 1769 apprenticeship record of my Worcester-born great-great-great-great-grandfather, then fourteen, in Aldgate -- George III had been on the throne for nine years.

It makes sense that our forebears should appear in London with the sudden burgeoning of the capital in the Georgian era.  By the mid-twentieth century, no one in either of our direct lines remained in England's capital city.

As much as I like to imagine an ancestor attending a Shakespearean play at the Globe or the Rose, or walking the same streets as Geoffrey Chaucer, so far it seems that those of our great-grandparents who put down roots in London, came to the great city with millions of others in the eighteenth century.

"The Enraged Musician" (1741) - William Hogarth

Four-century see-saw

This is London Bridge in 1616, in a famous engraving by Claes Janz Visscher.  If you look at the lower right hand corner, you'll see heads on spikes, a little public service announcement for people considering treason. (Click on the picture, if you must.)

And this is the same scene in 2016, drawn by artist Robin Richards.

If you go here, you can spend hours of fun, sliding back and forth between two years that are four centuries apart.

Not me, though. I'm going to bed.

Yet another double-duty posting

The Princes in the Tower by Alison Weir

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Richard III Society. My husband was: I bought a membership for him as a birthday present, and he occasionally wears a sweatshirt with the White Boar emblazoned across it. He remains a staunch Ricardian (and a champion of James I, the subject of his thesis for his Honours History).

This book would drive him crazy. I had never heard of Alison Weir; she seems to be a prolific writer. She pretty much agrees with Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard, opening her book with two quotes from his Richard III. She sets out her evidence, relying heavily on primary sources, in a readable way, but every time she makes a sweeping statement, I find myself muttering "Wait a minute! How does this prove anything?" This isn't the sort of feeling one should keep confronting while reading a history book, is it?

I don't have strong feelings pro or con for Richard of York, but I have spent the past year in particular with books by other historians on other topics, including Ian Mortimer and Elizabeth Longford. If I'm going to read a book about who murdered the little princes in the Tower, I think I'd feel more confident somehow with the work and research of one of them.


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