There is good reason to be fearful that Wahabism can never find its home in the modern world. On the other hand, there are rays of hope that emanate from royal family indicative of a desire to be a contributing part of the modern world. The author has, I think, done us all a service in bringing...
TL;DR: Lacey’s work is a fun romp through history, though I had are a few minor problems with his choices.When interpreting a literary work, the reader sometimes must make a distinction between what the author intends and what the author achieves. I think that distinction should be made for Lacey...
This is the third in a somewhat unintentional trio of books set (or partially set) in seventeenth-century England. It’s “somewhat” because once I got them all from the library, I decided to read them consecutively and see how such a thematic grouping affected my perception of them. Alas, all thre...
This was a lovely jaunt of a book. I enjoyed my journey through her life thanks to the painstakingly researched but highly sensitive narrative of the author. From Philadelphia upper middle class family life to a film star and then princess are the ingredients of a fairy tale. However, played o...
So when Prasutagus, the leader of the Iceni people, died in ad 60 he prudently left half his wealth and territories to the emperor Nero as a form of ‘death duty’. The Iceni occupied the flat fenlands that stretched down from the Wash across modern Norfolk and Suffolk and, like other Celtic people...
98 “modern infrastructure”: Clive Morgan, e-mail to author, December 8, 2008. 98 “people try to test you”: Mohammed bin Fahd, interview with author, Damman, January 30, 2007. 98 “embraced each other”: Ibid. 99 prisoners were ...
She had made five movies in just eight months, and Alfred Hitchcock was waiting for her down in Cannes, ready to start another. Grace had only a few hours in the French capital between her morning arrival by plane and her evening departure on the famous Blue Train for the Riviera, and by rights s...
El Draque was a name with which to frighten naughty children, a fire-breathing monster whose steely, glittering scales‘remained impregnable’, wrote the sixteenth-century dramatist Lope de Vega,‘to all the spears and all the darts of Spain’. By the 1580s, Francis Drake’s re...