Marfy > Recent Status Updates

Having trouble caring about the narrator.

I've loaned it to someone, and must not forget to get it back. Pagden is a great writer.

I realize reading this how much better John Julius Norwich is.

This is so elegantly written. And it's just the right size for comfortable reading.

The research required to write this book must have been tremendous.

This book fills in the blanks of my knowledge of land history. Several terms are used that I need to look up. Thank goodness there is a glossary.

"We cannot be surprised to find stupid folks among the electors, and indeed they are numerous enough in this world to have a claim to be represented."

A description of how voters love to interrogate candidates for office, their questions being quite personal and irrelevant. It seems the treatment of politicians today has changed very little from France in the 1830s. No doubt American voters were just as impertinent then as they are now. Of course, Balzac does a wonderful job of skewering politicians as well as voters.

Trying to sort out the genealogy. Robert of Gloucester--who is he?

Americans failed to develop "a distinctively rural culture." You don't get the kind of life depicted in Hardy's book or in Lark Rise to Candleford. Americans would not stay put.

It is clear that H is writing long before the feminist movement caught on. Everything is on male terms.

H refers to "the dreadful impasse of our polarized world" which was in 1955. He wasn't talking about communists and capitalists, but to liberals and conservatives. Sounds familiar.

The Farmer and the Realities

That's it--"a tendency toward a dismissive ruthlessness." That's what bothers me about Jefferson.

It is still difficult to understand how J could turn a blind eye to the outrages of the French Revolution, but Hitchens did try to shed some light on this.

Hitchens makes an interesting biographer, being both British and American, and also not a professional historian. He looks at Jefferson with fresh eyes, and also with awareness of recent studies that have expanded what we know of this paradoxical man.

The Preface was an interesting summary of the many ways the Revolution has been interpreted over the years. It all depends on one's politics.

The book has ended but the tension has not broken. Cromwell's high wire act.

Interesting to read this after having just read Q. The Reformation was a complicated business.