Review: The English, Portrait of a People

In Jeremy Paxman’s The English, A Portrait of aPeople, the author attempts to establish a national identity for the English, not British, people. With their Celtic roots, he argues that the Welsh and Scots have a strong “national” identity. The Welsh have managed to hold on to their language and their songs while the Scots have their bagpipes, Parliament, legal system, and field their own football teams in World Cup competitions. So what about the English?

Paxman traces the history of the British stereotype, beginning with the obese, meat-eating, ale-drinking John Bull in the 18^th Century followed by the stiff-upper-lipped Englishman of the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries. The latter stereotype is the result of the British public (private in the U.S.) school system in which boys are treated badly as a matter of course, made to eat vile or tasteless food, and are expected to just “take it.” Their training served them well in the two world wars. But what about their 21^st century identity? That is the essence of the book.

For 266 pages, Paxman wanders the country in search of a national identity for the English, and in some cases, with amusing results. An editor and uber patriot, Roy Faiers, contends that you don’t have “to be English to be English.” “The actor James Stewart was an American, but he has Englishness.” By the time you get to the end of the book, you still have no sense of who a late 20th-Century Englishman is (other than he loves football and prefers lager). But in a country as ethnically diverse as England, is it even possible?

In the U.S., I have lived in the Northeast, Mid Atlantic, Southwest, and Texas (which is its own region). In Arizona, many of my friends are from the Midwest—refugees from the region's harsh winters. I can tell you that, like the English, it is difficult to say what a typical American is like. There are generalities: we are very patriotic and more religious than most Western nations, but you only have to look at our politics to see the great divide.

Although I enjoyed Paxman’s book, I was looking for something to hold on to—a Eureka moment where Paxman would reveal the true Englishman, but it never came. And so I ambled along. Because it was written 14 years ago, it is dated. But even in 1998, Paxman came up with very little to show for his efforts to find an English persona. I would think his task would be impossible today.

Book Review - Daughter of Time

It’s been awhile since I wrote a book review, but I just loved The Daughter of Time. It has a lot of things going for it: It was published the year I was born (1951), it is history driven, and it is short (just like my attention span of late).

The mystery begins with Detective Inspector Grant of Scotland Yard laid up in the hospital with a broken leg. Supremely bored, a friend brings him museum postcards with portraits of famous historical characters who have mysteries connected with them (e.g., Louis XVII, the son of the guillotined Louis XVI - did he survive his imprisonment in the Concierge during the French Revolution?). Inspector Grant settles on the portrait of Richard III, the English king everyone loves to hate—thanks in large part to Shakespeare.

The Clergy - Time for Other Things

I am currently reading At Home, A History of Private Life  by Bill Bryson, and it is chock full of interesting facts including the role of clergy in England: "Piety was not necessarily a requirement or even an expectation. Ordination in the Church of England required a university degree, but most ministers read classics and didn't study divinity at all... Many didn't even bother composing sermons, but just bought a big book of prepared sermons and read one out once a week. Though no one intended it, the effect was to create a class of well-educated, wealthy people who had immense amounts of time on their hands. In consequence, many of them began to do remarkable things:

George Bayldon, a vicar in remote Yorkshire, became a self-taught authority in linguistics and compiled the world's first dictionary of the Icelandic language.

Laurence Sterne vicar of a parish near York, wrote popular novels, including The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.

Two Reviews for Captain Wentworth

It's not often I get two good reviews in one day for the same novel, but that was what happened yesterday at Diary of an Eccentric and Austenprose. Here are excerpts:

Diary of an Eccentric: Like Persuasion, Captain Wentworth Home from the Sea  is a sweet story about second chances.  I loved this book and was sad that it was so short....  I’d love to see this book expanded into a full-length novel!

Austenprose: Captain Wentworth Home from the Sea is a very pleasant diversion for Persuasion enthusiasts. Simonsen respects the intensity of Anne and Frederick’s love, and her alterations to Austen’s plot are neither extreme nor implausible. 

The Black Tower - A Book Review

I love a good historical mystery, especially if the author has successfully recreated the era in which the story takes place. The Black Tower by Louis Bayard is just such a book . Dr. Hector Carpentier is drawn into a web of intrigue when his address is found on a note in the pocket of a murder victim. Carpentier doesn’t know Henri LeClerc—yet. But when Paris detective Vidocq shows up at his door, he is about to find out who the deceased is. Vidocq is the master of disguise, and he needs every one if he is to find out if Louis Charles, the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, survived the abuse and neglect of his guards in the Temple’s Black Tower during the French Revolution. Because if he did, he is France's rightful king.

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves

I love English. I love grammar. Even when I get it wrong (dangle a particple, don't use an antecedent, run-on sentence), I love learning about the nuts and bolts of English. If you attended a Catholic school in the 1950s and '60s as I did, then you know how to diagram a sentence, that is, breaking a sentence down into its component parts so that you know how a sentence goes together. It was boring, but necessary, and it has served me well.

I am a sucker for buying books about the English language. As a result, I know about the great vowel shift and inkhorn terms and Chancery English, and so when I saw Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots, and Leaves at a used bookstore, I bought it.

Publishing a book on grammar takes guts. Inevitably, you will have thousands of people poring over your every sentence looking for mistakes and posting reviews on Amazon, and in this book, it doesn't take long to find them. We all make mistakes, but the author's overuse of the semicolon borders on abuse. A similar complaint can be made for her use of the colon. Even her use of commas is questionable.

In short, this book should not be used as a grammar guide, especially if you are an American. (Truss is British.) British and American grammar differ, particularly in the use of quotation marks. Another quibble: One half of this small book is devoted to the misuse of an apostrophe. This is a legitimate complaint, but half a book? That's overkill.

A Jane Austen Education - A Review

Although I have greatly enjoyed most of what Jane Austen wrote, I never liked Mansfield Park. I found Fanny Price insufferable, and Edmund Bertram a bit of a bore. As for the other characters, with the possible exception of Mary Crawford, I didn’t like them enough to care about them. For me, personally, the novel was a dud, but that was before I read William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love and Friendship.

According to Deresiewicz, Austen had something to teach us in Mansfield Park: a form of usefulness. After Edmund encounters ten-year-old Fanny Price, who was crying after being separated from her family and brought to Mansfield Park, he said: “Let us walk out in the park, and you shall tell me all about your brothers and sisters.”

Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim

Yesterday, on Austen Authors, Cindy Jones, author of My Jane Austen Summer, asked her fellow authors to share where they would like to vacation if they could be dropped into one of their favorite novels. I immediately thought of Elizabeth Von Arnim's The Enchanted April. The setting, post World War I England, is a sad place. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of men who died in the war, there are even a greater number of men who returned home wounded in mind and body. War widows and those who have lost fathers, brothers, and friends walk about in the dreary colors of mourning.

Jane Austen, A Life by Carol Shields - A Book Review

If you are interested in whether Jane Austen preferred strawberry to raspberry jam, then you will want to look for a biography other than Carol Shields’ Jane Austen, A Life. However, if you want a broad sweep of the life of the early 19th century author, then this slim volume is the perfect cup of tea. Carol Shields, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries, was asked by Penguin Books to write this biography. Because it was not meant to be comprehensive, I found it an easy read with a nice mixture of Jane’s personal life juxtaposed with her writing. From the biography:

We think of Pride and Prejudice as Jane Austen’s sunniest novel, and yet it was written during a period of unhappiness. No letters survived from the year 1797, and this is a clue, though an unreliable one. Cassandra, we know, was recovering from the death of her fiancé, and Jane from her disappointment over Tom Lefroy. The household at Steventon had shrunk. Visitors continued to arrive, but the ongoing bustle of life in the country rectory had faded… Theatricals in the barn were a thing of the past. The Austen parents were growing older, and finances, too, were thinner. Yet from this difficult time sprang a fast-paced, exuberant, much loved novel with a new kind ofheoine, a young woman of warmth and intelligence who, by the flex of her own mind, remakes her future and makes it spectacularly.

The Venus Fixers by Ilaria Dagnini Brey - A Review

In 1943, the Allies appointed the Monuments Officers, a group of art historians, curators, architects, and artists, to ensure that the masterpieces of European art and architecture were not looted or bombed into oblivion. The officers of Italy shored up tottering palaces and cathedrals, safeguarded Michangelos and Giottos, and even blocked a Nazi convoy of stolen paintings bound for Goring’s birthday celebration. Sometimes they failed, but to an astonishing degree they succeeded. (from the back jacket)


The Venus Fixers by Ilaria Dagnini Brey is the remarkable tale of a small group of men who were attached to the British and American Armies for the purpose of preserving and restoring the art and monuments of Sicily and Italy. The task was daunting. Every village had a church or monument or piazza in need of preservation. The cities of Naples and Florence were mother lodes of artwork and monuments sitting in the midst of an active theater of operations. But in some cases, before they could make damage assessments, the Venus Fixers had to find the artwork first.

To protect the artwork, paintings and sculptures were taken out of the cities and moved into the country to thickly walled churches or medieval fortresses where they would be safe. Or would they?

Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron - A Review

Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron by Stephannie Barron is a multi-layered Regency mystery, and the sleuth is none other than Jane Austen. Following the death of Henry Austen’s wife, Eliza, Comtesse de Feuillide, Jane and her brother make arrangements to visit the seaside town of Brighton. However, their plans for a quiet interlude fall by the wayside when a stop at a posting inn results in Jane and Henry rescuing a young lady, Catherine Twining, from a forced elopement with the scandal-ridden Lord Byron. When the girl’s body is discovered a few days later, a drowning victim, who is sewn into a canvas shroud and deposited in the bed of Lord Byron, the poet becomes the prime murder suspect.

Marie Therese, Marie Antoinette's Daughter, Jane Austen's Contemporary

Marie Therese (1778-1851) is the story of the only surviving child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI of France. Because of their tragic end on the guillotine, the royal couple is a favorite of biographers and historical novelists, and the first third of the book recounts the circumstances that led to their execution, the difference being that, in Marie Therese, we are looking at these events through the eyes of a young girl. The downward spiral that began with the storming of the Bastille and led to the Reign of Terror started when Marie Therese was only 11 years old. While at Versailles, "Madame Royal" was forced to hide from armed mobs screaming for her mother's blood and to step over the butchered bodies of servants.

Three years later, the king, queen, Marie Therese, and her brother, the Dauphin, Louis-Charles, are incarcerated in the Temple Prison in Paris, and the horrors begin: the execution of her parents, the prolonged torture of her little brother who would die of neglect, and her own imprisonment. When she is finally released 3-1/2 years later, she is allowed to join her mother's brother, Emperor Franz II, in Austria. However, "The Orphan of the Tower" is now a young woman of steely resolve and one who recognizes the importance of her role as a representative of the Bourbon dynasty in exile.

In the years following her release from prison, Marie Therese and her husband, the Duc D’Angouleme, lived a peripatetic existence, finally ending up in England, where they watched the events unfolding in France. With Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, the Bourbon dynasty was again restored. For the next 15 years, France would be Marie Therese's home until, once again, the French wanted to be rid of their king, Charles X.

Marie Therese is an exhaustive, highly detailed account of the life of Madame Royal, the French Revolution, and the complexities of European politics in the early 19th century. In addition to the great events in the lives of the royals, minutiae, such as travel itineraries, meals, the appearances of numerous pretenders to the throne, are recorded. At times, the inclusion of so many mundane details bogs down the book, but for anyone who ever wanted to know what happened to the only surviving child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, they will have to wonder no longer.

* * *

After exile in Vienna, Marie Therese and her husband moved to Great Britain in 1809 where she settled at Hartwell House, Buckinghamshire. Marie Therese's  father-in-law, the Comte d'Artois, spent most of his time in Edinburgh, where he had been given apartments at Holyrood House.

The long years of exile ended with the Napoleon's abdication  in 1814 and the restoration of Bourbon dynasty. The ascension of  Louis XVIII  to the throne of France took place twenty-one years after the death of his brother, Louis XVI.

Review of Nefertiti by Michelle Moran

Before I became an author, I reviewed books for a review website. This was before the book blog explosion. One of the novels I reviewed was the hardback edition of  Nefertiti by Michelle Moran. I really enjoyed this book, so here is my review:

As a woman from the ancient world, only Cleopatra surpasses Nefertiti in name recognition. Her bust has become one of the most easily identifiable objects from the reigns of the Pharaohs in Egypt. Michelle Moran’s Nefertiti is the story of the daughter of Vizier Ay, who became the Chief Wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten, co-regent with her husband, and as some have speculated, the successor pharaoh to Akhenaten.

Most parents of a teenager have said at least one time, “The world does not revolve around you.” However, in the case of Nefertiti and Akhenaten, it actually did. At the ages of 15 and 17, these two young people rose to the highest position in Lower Egypt (nearest the Mediterranean) and eventually ruled all of Egypt and its far-reaching empire. The phrase, “palace intrigue,” might very well have been invented in their court.

The Wordy Shipmates - A Review

The Wordy Shipmates is a look at our Puritan roots. A book about the Puritans? Pretty dry stuff—unless it’s written by Sarah Vowell. But reading this book reminded me of someone who drives a SUV with off-road capabilities. You are humming along reading a rambling, but very interesting, story of the Puritans carving a civilization out of a wilderness, when you find yourself on a side road that takes you to a story line involving the Brady Bunch.

But when she writes of John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and religious zealots, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, and the Puritans’ Indian allies and/or enemies, it is a page turner. She brings a unique and often amusing perspective to this chapter in Colonial American history. As an American, she is an admirer of these people who wanted to build “a city on the hill” for all to emulate, but as a realist, she examines the contradictions of a God-fearing people who can burn an entire Pequot village, women and children included, and find that such an act is Bible based. Grade: A-