cacakerbamakhlukpolitik

This week I have been reading an excellent book published half a century ago by Samuel Beer, then a distinguished member of the Government Department and one of the most important educators at Harvard, British Politics in the Collectivist Era .  This evening I saw the film Midnight's Chldren , written and based on a book by Salman Rushdie, which is a symbolic history of India from the 1930s through the 1970s.  Both of them left me with a heavy feeling of how the world has changed during my adult life--because both of them are stories of national life. Beer's book was also striking because it illustrated the huge changes in political science in the last half century.  I took very few Government courses in my undergraduate years and I did not have to take Social Sciences 2, Beer's general education course, but I was thereby the loser.  Beard's book shows--and assumes--a fairly detailed knowledge of British history at least since the seventeenth century.  It's a bo...

Henrietta Godolphin,  2nd Duchess of Marlborough Recently on my Regency loop, there was a query about whether someone could make her heroine a duchess in her own right. The answer is yes, but you'd have to model your fictional title after that of the Duke of Marlborough, and seeing as this is the ONLY dukedom that can be inherited by a daughter, you'd have to create a very detailed background for your family and there would likely be a lot of howling. It's rather easy (comparatively speaking) for your heroine to be a countess or a baroness in her own right though. It all comes down to how the title was created ... Ancient Earldoms were mainly created by investiture and oral grant by the king (aka girding; literally belting the man). They were sometimes created by an Act of Parliament and would have a Royal Charter (before Henry VI [1422-1461] per Peerage Law in England ; after this point letter patent are the norm). Dukedoms, and marquisates are later creations and were ...

This is really less a full-blown post than just a few thoughts, but I wanted to put them out there while they were still rattling around in my head. I've seen several programs recently that dealt in various ways with the Scots-Irish, and it got me thinking about something. I'll get to it in a moment, but first a quick refresher on the Scots-Irish (sometimes Scotch-Irish) and their importance to MCH and to the country. The Scots-Irish were Scottish Protestants (primarily Presbyterians) who were forced by King James I (himself a Scotsman) to settle in the newly-conquered Catholic lands of Northern Ireland, in the region of Ulster, in the early 1600's. Over the next century, these Presbyterian Scots endured numerous hardships and persecutions, many caused by the fluctuating leanings of the English crown regarding their preferred religious strain. By the early 18th Century, many of these Scots-Irish families had decided they'd had enough, and set off west in the hope of fi...

 President Obama confirmed once again last Thursday that Dwight Eisenhower, not Franklin Roosevelt or JFK, is his real role model.  Generationally Obama and Eisenhower represent the same Nomad archetype, Ike from the Lost generation and Obama from Gen X, and they both believe in a degree of bipartisanship, an end to crusades, and an attempt to retrench.  More specifically, Obama wants--as he has made clear again and again--to put the Boomer-inspired controversies that have dominated the last 40 years behind us.  And now, he hopes, by the time he leaves office, to declare an end to the war on terror.  In one sense this decision is long overdue.  In another, it ignores critical remaining problems for which we simply have no solution. In quoting James Madison to the effect that no nation could preserve its liberty through endless war, Obama implicitly drew a huge lesson from the last seventy years of American history.  Our liberties have been threatened i...

“The truth is, we have always been competing against one another. To be prettier, more accomplished, better-dressed. To be the most marriageable. And though none of us dare say it, this new contest is so much more fun .” Fishnets, knee-pads and girls called Bette Noir or Babe Ruthless - the world of roller derby isn’t exactly your average setting for historical fiction. But when women’s writing website For Books’ Sake teamed up with the London Rollergirls and announced they were putting out an anthology of short stories about my favourite sport, I found myself wondering if I could bend the rules a little - and as any rollergirl worth her salt knows, it doesn’t count if you don’t get caught. As For Books’ Sake’s resident historical fiction expert , I’m a lot more comfortable with corsets than crash helmets and having skated with the London Rollergirls briefly, I decided that writing about it would be a slightly safer way of enjoying the thrill of the track (a theory...

I'd been looking all over for someplace for my hero Ash and my heroine Lydia to have sex. They're in a betrothal of convenience so they can be alone together without a chaperone, but: it's wintertime, cold and wet outside; Ash is staying at an inn where she would be recognized; and Lydia's family home is huge but filled with windows and it's unpredictable when a servant might pop in or a gardener or visitor wander by outside. Then, in an unrelated conversation, Ash (who grew up very poor) asked if Lydia's house had an orangery like he's heard about. And it hit me: the conservatory would be warm, and in the evening there wouldn't be anyone there. Could this be the place? I did some research, online and at the library. I highly recommend the book Glass Houses: A History of Greenhouses, Orangeries, and Conservatories  by May Woods and Arete Swartz Warren. I discovered a few things that surprised me (having known absolutely nothing about the topic previously...

This is a big month for yours truly, marking the end of my formal full-time academic career.  But I suspect it will live in history as a critical month for another reason: the end of any hope that the Obama Administration will accomplish anything further, and, quite probably,. of the modern era of liberalism.  Several years ago I made a new friend who spent some time reading through the posts I had made since 2004, and she complimented me that so many of my predictions had come true.  I'm afraid the time has come for more predictions. The Republicans will gain a few seats in the House and Senate in 2014, and it's quite likely that they will regain the White House in 2016.  The will precede to the final dismantling of the work of the Great Society, having finished off the New Deal some time ago. Barack Obama entered office five years ago possessed of solid majorities in the House and Senate, and facing a national crisis that everyone had to acknowledge.  But from...

One of the interesting questions Cara Elliott / Andrea Penrose asked when she interviewed me on Word Wenches about The Paris Affair concerned how I developed Malcolm's & Suzanne's pasts and how I developed them. In addition to the fascination of researching history, I love creating my characters' history. I knew from the start that Malcolm & Suzanne's allegiances would be divided, Malcolm a British diplomat and spy, Suzanne a French agent. Then I began to think about what kind of people would end up their situations. The divide between them seemed to be to strongest if Malcolm came from the heart of the British aristocracy – he doesn’t have a title himself, but his mother’s father is a duke, he’s connected by family or friendship to a good portion of the beau monde, he went to Harrow and Oxford. Whereas with Suzanne, I had to figure out a background that would have made someone an agent in her teens. It made sense that she had been orphaned and left ...

For more than a month the press has been reporting that Caroline Kennedy is going to be appointed by President Obama as Ambassador to Japan.  Nothing has happened officially yet, so perhaps a snag has developed, but I must say that I scratched my head when I heard the news and haven't been able to get it out of my mind ever since.  It's not that I have anything against Caroline Kennedy at all, on the contrary.  I once met her at a Kennedy Library event and she was as gracious and charming as she could be.  She has had an emotionally difficult life, however privileged it might have been in some respects, and she played an important role in 2008 in getting Barack Obama the Democratic nomination.  But if she is indeed appointed, it will be yet another piece of evidence of the enormous changes in the business of governing in the fifty years since her father was President. John F. Kennedy ran for President in 1960 arguing that the United States was in a worldwide Col...

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the demise of the historical novel.  In fact, I’ve been hearing about it on a weekly basis.  Three weeks ago, friends back from the London Book Fair informed me that the scuttlebutt there was that the historical novel was dead.  Last week, AAR posted “Where have all the Historical Romances gone?”  And just this week, Dear Author opined that the historical romance should be put out of its misery. What’s going on? I have a bunch of theories, none of them terribly coherent.  (I’m in the midst of revisions just now, so my brain is a sub-species of mush.)  But here they are, such as they are: The market tends to glut.  Remember the rise and fall of chick lit?  A particular sort of book tends to sell very well, spawns a sea of sequels, readers eventually get bored, and the trend dies.  On the historical fiction side, we’ve seen this with the Other Other Other Boleyn Girl’s fourteenth cousin twice remove...

 During the Second World War, the British Broadcasting Corporation was perhaps the allies' most important propaganda weapon in occupied Europe.  Although Britain was fighting for its life, the BBC's short-wave news broadcasts had a simple rule: tell the truth.  Britain suffered a long series of setbacks and disasters during the first three years of the war, but the BBC never tried to peddle false optimism about the campaigns in Norway, Belgium, France, North Africa, Greece, and Crete.  And therefore, when they had good news to report, their listeners believed it as well.  Meanwhile, they could note the contrast between British news reporting and the Axis propaganda they had to deal with every day. I was reminded of this, sadly, this morning, when I picked up my newspaper and discovered that Mark Sanford had defeated Elizabeth Busch in a special South Carolina Congressional election.  Checking online, I found that the victory was a comfortable one: 54% to 46...

Several years ago I created a Regency paper doll for my very first RWA conference. I thought it was a fun way to introduce myself to the Beau Monde Chapter. So I drew her and all her clothes and had it printed up in a limited edtion of 100 copies that were put in all the conference bags. It recently occured to me that I could give her a second life on my website as a freebie. And then a couple of readers suggested it would be fun to hold coloring contests. So I'm going to be doing montly giveaways based around her clothes (and adding new outfits as we go along). This is the first one, and we're coloring her habit. Download Harriet's habit and color it in however you chose (the full PDF of the doll and all her clothes is on the page as well). You'll find plenty of inspiration over on my Georgian Habit Pinterest Board. Email me a scan or a snap shot of your final design (isobelcarr.author (at) gmail.com) with HARRIET'S HABIT in the subject line by May 31st. All entri...

In the 1930s, in a famous essay entitled "Shooting an Elephant," George Orwell, looking back on his tour in Burma as an imperial policeman in the 1920s, shared his feelings about the British Empire. "I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it," he wrote. "All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty."  Orw...