1 comments about Queen Victoria: A Portrait.

1. This is one of the best biographies of Queen Victoria that I have ever read! The author, Giles St. Aubyn, likes his subject and therefore makes the book sympathetic toward Victoria and greatly interesting to the reader.

No comments about La Guerre italienne en 1860: Campagne de Garibaldi dans les Deux-Siciles et autres événements militaires... avec cartes et plans. Traduite de l\'allemand par J. Vivien.

No comments about The Life and Times of William Ewart Gladstone: Part 1.

No comments about Lloyd George (Lancaster Pamphlets).

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1 comments about Moment Of War.

1. This memoir of a young English man who volunteers to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War describes in detail much of the squalor of that war. He departs from France and crosses into the Republican areas of Spain illegally with no preparation and no plan. He just walks across the border with a violin in his backpack and his actual passport. Once he arrives, the Republican forces assume that he is a spy, as his passport stamps prove that he was in Spanish Morocco shortly before the insurrection began.
   He barely escapes from being shot and he becomes one more motley man in a motley crew of international volunteers. They have come from England, Belgium, Sweden, Russia and France, thinking that the Republican cause was a great crusade against fascism. However, disillusionment sets in very quickly as his adventure can be summed up with the phrase, `cold, ragged, dirty and hungry."
   Lee captures the despair and pathetic destruction of the Spanish countryside during the war. The war has transformed the Spanish people into a ragged bad, on the brink of starvation and subject to death from artillery or aerial bombardment at any time. Eventually, he is put into battle and kills at least one member of the Franco forces. It gives him no joy and it is clear to all that he is such a poor soldier that not even the Republican forces, so desperate for fighting men, has a use for him. In a conclusion typical of this man's try for glory, he is arrested when he tries to go back to France, only to be rescued from prison by another British man.
   The Republican forces in the Spanish Civil war accepted many idealistic young men and turned them into cynical men struggling to survive or a pile of rotting flesh. Lee captures many aspects of the conflict and unlike other authors such as Hemingway, who portrayed it as a great cause, describes it as a simple destroyer of men.

No comments about UNUSUAL UNDERTAKINGS: A Military Memoir.

1 comments about Boudica.

1. I put this `groundbreaking biography of the True Warrior Queen' (if you believe the publishing headline) down thankful I had only borrowed it from a library. The problem with this latest effort to investigate the reality of one of Britain's most famous female leaders is that is it emotionally biased. A fact cheerfully admitted by the author in the introduction where her search for "edgier role models" meant "a warrior queen called Boudicea had a particular resonance with a young impressionable child on the lookout for strong and feisty mentors" (page 6). Alarm bells began to go off as I progressed through the introduction that this was a biography seeking to confirm the heroic fantasy figure myth of Boudica rather than provide a somewhat drier, dispassionate account of one of Britain's most enduring legacies. A quote on the jacket from a periodical stated "The book's principle achievement is the humanizing of a legend". I confess I found it did precisely the opposite.
   There is no denying the author's passion for the subject but it proves detrimental in the novel's presentation and factual outlay. You can easily get swept along by Collingridge's excitement as she trots round the halls of academia and various parts of the British landscape but the danger is that the presentation of `facts' become believable when there is in fact no firm foundation. A good example of this comes on page 159 where the author chooses to take the meagre facts of the death of Lindow Man and create some kind of heady ritualistic death scene based on pure fantasy. This kind of emotive scene setting continues throughout, from the opening chapters that skim rather loosely through Roman history till half way through when we get a screenplay description of her final battle. Phrases like: "The clash, when it came, was electric - a fusion of light, sound and white hot energy as the leading soldiers cut a gash through the mass of British warriors, dividing them, annihilating them" (page 242) will make the academic reader pause somewhat.
   So, having felt I was sitting through a film rather than a historical biography, it was somewhat better to get to the second half of the work where the author does offer a new set of interesting analysis on Boudica's impact on Britain's cultural history from Milton to Celtomania, Gray and then Queen Victoria and Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, the second part of the work does make it worth reading and anyone with knowledge of Boudica would do well to actually start at chapter 15.
   This is a somewhat unique biography in that the passion of the author for the subject is detailed up front and the reader is swept along in a bright-eyed way . Unfortunately, only someone who has studied the period in some detail will recognise the constant stream of `facts' that aren't quite right or aren't fully explored. As such it is a good starter biography for pre-graduate or interested readers but people wishing to delve more deeply into the history of the period and Boudica herself will have to go elsewhere for that drier historical analysis that would be required. I suspect most of my disappointment came from the jacket statements that set an expectation that wasn't met and personal knowledge of the period and the subject meant inconsistency and emotive language was easily spottable, all of which meant the inevitable conclusion that the work confirms the fantastical nature of our perception of Boudica rather than ending up with a quiet respect for the reality of what this legendary warrior queen achieved for her people and subsequent generations.

3 comments about Phoenix: The Image of the King: Charles I and Charles II.

1. Not only am I writing about Cavalier Spaniels, I am currently doing a story on the making of the breed and find you had what I needed for reference work. Thank you.



2. While I agree with the previous reviewer that this book is not an historical chronicle of the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, it does not purport to be. What it does provide is superb insight into the personalities of these two fascinating monarchs, their public images and private personae. One can get excellent chronicles of the reign elsewhere. Here, one encounters vivid exposition and analysis of the thoughts, motives and manners of the kings, and how these were affected by the conscious cultivation of image. Ollard is, as always,elegant and eloquent.



3. Skip this book if you're looking for details into the reigns of these monarchs or specific instances of foreign policy, etc. This book mostly discusses the image of the kings, as the title suggests. There is little mention of Charles I's attempt to rule without his Parliment, but instead concentrates on his exquisit art collections, his vanity and his self-image. There is more written about Charles II and how his exile shaped his personality and made him so markedly different from his father. The book itself is small and is a fast read. It is a great character sketch on these two Kings.

No comments about The Two Protectors: Oliver And Richard Cromwell.