Status Updates From Pax Britannica: The Climax ...

Could it be that I finally finish this after 6 years? Possibly?

I have tried for like 5 years to finish this book. It is such a different beast from the first volume in the series, which moves along at a good clip while keeping you deeply engaged in the chronological narrative. I struggle with this book because it focusses only on one year: 1897. I find the lack of a chronological narrative to be really hard to follow. The short vignettes and idylls are good, but get same-y.

“I have a strong fellow-feeling for a craftsman who said of his most successful work, Derby Day, that the acrobats, the nigger minstrels, gypsy fortune tellers, to say nothing of carriages filled with pretty women, together with the sporting element, seemed to offer abundant material for the line of art to which I felt obliged… to devote myself”

Sometimes the past really is another country…

“Austin was apparently impervious to criticism, and this is lucky, for nobody has had a good word for him since his death in 1913.”

Oof

Ireland as the Empire's oldest and most curdled of British colonies. Not submitting even after hundreds and hundreds of years of occupation and mismanagement. Morris is much less breezy here than in other places where she's used acid wit to make subtle pointse