Bianca Maria Visconti, Duchess of Milan
1 week ago
Tory Historian has been reading the excellent biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by John Dickson Carr, another famous detective story writer. It brings the old boy to life in a way no subsequent "life" has managed to do though TH has a bone to pick with JDC: The Adventure of the Dancing Men is not one of the best Sherlock Holmes stories but one of the worst. It is completely incredible, very silly and gives no indication as to how...
As it happens my attention was somewhere else but was sharply called to this subject by the The Organic Tory, who points out that today is the birthday of two eminent and important people.
Firstly, one of my own favourite writers and historic personalities: Samuel Pepys, born on February 23, 1633 in the heart of London, just off Fleet Street, to real London parents a tailor and the daughter of a Whitechapel butcher. Pepys is known largely...
Tory Historian managed to see something like half of the exhibition Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination at the British Library. There will have to be at least one more visit though one has to pay to get in. Not only the exhibits are overwhelming in their beauty and fascinating content and details but the curatorship is on the sort of high level one has learnt to expect from this institution.
The British Library, incidentally, has a collection of fascinating blogs, one of which is on the subject of the various...
I am still reading Robin Harris's magisterial history of the Conservative party and it is getting ever more interesting. There is no doubt that the author is more interested in the second half of the nineteenth and, presumably, the twentieth centuries than in the early days of Burke, Pitt and, even, Canning.
In the account of the Eastern crisis of 1876 there is a paragraph from a letter by Lord Salisbury, then Secretary of State for...
Tory Historian has always found visits to Tate Britain, home of the superb collection of British art, intellectually stimulating and emotionally soothing. Not so, this afternoon. Most of it has been turned into an outpost of Tate Modern.
While the Clore Wing remains largely devoted to Turner, it now has an exhibition of Romantics, which intersperses paintings by artists who were more or less his contemporaries as well as modern artists who paint supposedly in the same vein. Whether Turner can be called a Romantic is a moot...
The Princess Elizabeth learned of her accession to the throne while on a tour in Kenya. She returned to London immediately. The Queen is greeted on her arrival by the Prime Minister and others:...
