Love this RT @ninagarcia RT @WSJ: Queen Elizabeth visited the #GameofThrones set... http://t.co/KeBeZJbvnI pic.twitter.com/DyNimhTHfd
— Monica Crowley (@MonicaCrowley) June 24, 2014
Love this RT @ninagarcia RT @WSJ: Queen Elizabeth visited the #GameofThrones set... http://t.co/KeBeZJbvnI pic.twitter.com/DyNimhTHfd
— Monica Crowley (@MonicaCrowley) June 24, 2014
11 comments:
"You must be joking", she's thinking.
Or "Thank God, I don't have to sit on that!"
And Prince Phillip still has game I see.
"Is somebody trying to tell me something"... the Queen ponders.
Think that's something? You should see the bidet!
My pop-up book says due to continuous clan fighting in pursuit of rule, the throne of swords is made to remind the king he can never be comfortable.
If the queen was familiar with the television story, so much as a pop-up book telling, and had an ounce of self-awareness, then she'd see her own family's miserable history spelled out in that depiction of monarchy.
My all time favorite book on her family's history is The Sunne in Splendour
The book opens with a knight racing a horse down a road and knocking into peasants. As he gallops off one of the peasants lets out a string of Middle English swears all in a row, "A pox on your house, the plague take you, your children be taken, bleed out your arse" etc. A whole string of them put in the mouth of one character and not mentioned again in a very long book. And that told me the author kept a file of swears as she researched her subject and then when writing dumped the whole file in one character in one incident, the character not heard of again, having appeared for the sole purpose of dumping the curse file.
I've seen such file dumps before in historic novels, but not so obvious as that. Usually spread out throughout the whole book, not got rid of so quickly.
Here is present day Elizabeth's kingdom through the eyes of a French blogger. He has assembled these photos of moral decay of Northern England (and Cardiff) for his own French amusement. Point to this Stags Hens and Bunnies when English presume to tell us the U.S. is fat. And point to the price when they presume cost of living here expensive.
Sharon Kay Penman is an excellent author and all of her books are worth reading. In particular her medieval mystery stories are a great read especially "Cruel as the Grave."
One of the best historical novels set close to that era is called "King Hereafter" by Dorothy Dunnett which is a retelling of the story of the historical Macbeth that was the basis for the play.
French blogger will always be rough on the English. That being said, I do not allow British lecturing about fat Americans within my earshot without returning fire. I see more fatsos just on the cab trip from Heathrow into London than I see on a daily basis back here in America. And they store it in weird places. They are the world capitol of back fat. Women who should wear their bras the other way round. Men, too.
Sunne in Splendor is an attempt to correct a (possible, okay, likely) historical character assassination on Richard III by the Tudors. It is fascinating but it's impossible to say whether or not he really was a bad, good or indifferent. They found his skeleton a year or so ago. He had severe spinal scolosis. It was painted out of his original portrait then painted back in, possibly with exaggeration, post-mortem.
I heard that the historical model was the War of the Roses---a strangely pretty name for what was, on a percentage basis, the most sanguine of English wars. But all the wars of that era were very like Game of Thrones. At the Battle of Lepanto, a Spanish captain had his hand mangled by a grenade. He was no shirker. He amputated his own hand, bandaged, and rejoined the battle. The Spanish commander of a castle besieged by the Ottomans was given a promise of a safe passage for his men and himself. The commander accepted the terms but made the mistake of surrendering in too arrogant a way, or so the Ottoman general claimed. The commander was captured and skinned alive. The Ottoman general had him stuffed and kept in his quarters like some kind of taxidermist exhibit. Game of Thrones actually downplays the violence and treachery of that era.
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