This was an interesting look into some of the queens of England. I was not impressed with all of her theories about some of these women, but her overall writing was great. I loved looking through time at the lives of these women and what they were faced with. She weaves a great thread of historic...
This is the first book review I have done in awhile due to a long and sad few months during which I lost my beloved uncle and I just have not felt like doing much but grieving. He was a book lover and always inspired me to read and continue to learn my whole life so I know he would want me to ge...
This was not quite such a trivial preoccupation as it might first seem. Since the seventeenth century, Paris had been synonymous with elegance and glamour, while the ingenuity of the Parisiennes during the occupation had not only boosted morale but made quite an impression on the arriving Allied ...
The king’s heralds announced my ancestry over the blaring of trumpets in the cathedral at Westminster: Isabelle, Countess of Angouleme, great-granddaughter of Louis VI of France, niece to the Emperor of Contantinople, kin to the royal houses of Hungary, Aragon, Castile, Jerusalem and Cyprus, to t...
The best fortress in the world, he told her, was nothing without loyalty. No stronghold could withstand the force of a people’s hatred. Caterina had learned this, that the respect and love she believed her people to bear for her was no more than craven fear. The cruelties her vengeance had inflic...
The bride was married from Aucordier’s in a fawn crêpe de Chine coat and skirt made up in Monguèriac; for a week, William was forbidden to go in pursuit of the bassoon in case he smeared the costume with excited grubby hands. Mademoiselle Lafage’s mother was coming from Paris, and her friend Simo...
If Bosworth may be taken, simply, as the date for the passing of the medieval age in England, then Morte d’Arthur, the chronicle of the rise and fall of Camelot, is that age’s fitting elegy. Romance does battle with treacherous, grasping reality, and reality wins. Sir Lancelot, the greatest knigh...
Her own family, the Rochechouart de Mortemarts, were distinguished by two qualities, their breeding and their charm. Theirs was one of the oldest and grandest families in France, and they had lived on their estate at Lussac, in the Poitou region, since the eighth century. The Mortemarts, of whom ...