Recent reading
Mar. 9th, 2020 06:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeMore historical researches...
Redcoat: The British Soldier In the Age of Horse and Musket by Richard Holmes. This is an account of the lives, adventures and deaths of British soldiers in the period from the Seven Years' War of the mid-eighteenth century to the Crimean War of the mid-nineteenth—so slightly later than The Flight of the Heron, but still very useful for getting some background on the sort of life Keith Windham would have been used to! It's not a chronological history—the major wars are the setting rather than the subject matter—but an exploration of various aspects of army life: recruitment and training, going on campaign, hierarchy, politics, discipline, habits and culture, marches, battle, etc. etc. It's written in a very accessible, engaging style that's enjoyable to read, and is full of all sorts of interesting and useful bits of information on everything from weaponry, how commissions and promotion worked and the social and political background of military affairs to how soldiers wore their hair and what food they cooked and ate (and what they drank. There's a lot of drink in this book). This turned out to be relevant to more than one of my fandoms—the stuff about the Peninsular campaign is a good background to those chapters of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and some of the descriptions of daily life in the army were familiar from Monstrous Regiment (although Holmes claims that Sweet Polly Olivers were rare in real life—but then, how would he know? :P).
Culloden and the '45 by Jeremy Black. Another Jacobite history, this one concentrating on the political and military background to the '45, with more about the international situation than internal Scottish affairs. It turns out the international situation in the mid-eighteenth century was really complicated! But I understand a bit more now about why France and Flanders were such a big deal and what Keith was doing before being unexpectedly dragged off to Scotland. Black's musings on the fortunes of Charles Edward's campaign, and speculations about the various places where things might have happened differently, were also very interesting. He argues strongly against the 'Whiggish' view of history (i.e. the 'bound to be top nation' school of thought satirised in 1066 And All That) that history is a matter of the march of progress towards the present day, and that the Jacobites and everyone else who opposed the inevitable progressive victors were doomed to failure from the start—in fact, there were plenty of ways it could have been otherwise, and very nearly was. All intriguing stuff!
...and some fiction!
From a Swedish Homestead by Selma Lagerlöf (1899; translated by Jessie Brochner, 1901). This is a collection of short to medium-length stories, ranging from small-scale domestic stories set in contemporary Sweden to saints' lives in medieval Italy and legends of ancient Rome. The stories are all more or less fairytale-ish in style and mood, many of them with religious elements and tone, and Lagerlöf's style works really, really well for this kind of thing—the writing is vivid and utterly gorgeous. Actually I think I enjoyed this one more than Gösta Berling's Saga, just because I felt like I 'got' the style much better in this kind of context. Lagerlöf is great at blending the magical, larger-than-life fairytale feeling of her settings and plots with a very detailed portrayal of complex human emotions and motivations—an old woman's loneliness and isolation and the blending of fear and sympathy for the spirits of the dead in 'Old Agnete', a mother's grief over the illegitimate child who won't be buried in her husband's family tomb in 'The Inscription On the Grave'. Really good stuff!
Redcoat: The British Soldier In the Age of Horse and Musket by Richard Holmes. This is an account of the lives, adventures and deaths of British soldiers in the period from the Seven Years' War of the mid-eighteenth century to the Crimean War of the mid-nineteenth—so slightly later than The Flight of the Heron, but still very useful for getting some background on the sort of life Keith Windham would have been used to! It's not a chronological history—the major wars are the setting rather than the subject matter—but an exploration of various aspects of army life: recruitment and training, going on campaign, hierarchy, politics, discipline, habits and culture, marches, battle, etc. etc. It's written in a very accessible, engaging style that's enjoyable to read, and is full of all sorts of interesting and useful bits of information on everything from weaponry, how commissions and promotion worked and the social and political background of military affairs to how soldiers wore their hair and what food they cooked and ate (and what they drank. There's a lot of drink in this book). This turned out to be relevant to more than one of my fandoms—the stuff about the Peninsular campaign is a good background to those chapters of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and some of the descriptions of daily life in the army were familiar from Monstrous Regiment (although Holmes claims that Sweet Polly Olivers were rare in real life—but then, how would he know? :P).
Culloden and the '45 by Jeremy Black. Another Jacobite history, this one concentrating on the political and military background to the '45, with more about the international situation than internal Scottish affairs. It turns out the international situation in the mid-eighteenth century was really complicated! But I understand a bit more now about why France and Flanders were such a big deal and what Keith was doing before being unexpectedly dragged off to Scotland. Black's musings on the fortunes of Charles Edward's campaign, and speculations about the various places where things might have happened differently, were also very interesting. He argues strongly against the 'Whiggish' view of history (i.e. the 'bound to be top nation' school of thought satirised in 1066 And All That) that history is a matter of the march of progress towards the present day, and that the Jacobites and everyone else who opposed the inevitable progressive victors were doomed to failure from the start—in fact, there were plenty of ways it could have been otherwise, and very nearly was. All intriguing stuff!
...and some fiction!
From a Swedish Homestead by Selma Lagerlöf (1899; translated by Jessie Brochner, 1901). This is a collection of short to medium-length stories, ranging from small-scale domestic stories set in contemporary Sweden to saints' lives in medieval Italy and legends of ancient Rome. The stories are all more or less fairytale-ish in style and mood, many of them with religious elements and tone, and Lagerlöf's style works really, really well for this kind of thing—the writing is vivid and utterly gorgeous. Actually I think I enjoyed this one more than Gösta Berling's Saga, just because I felt like I 'got' the style much better in this kind of context. Lagerlöf is great at blending the magical, larger-than-life fairytale feeling of her settings and plots with a very detailed portrayal of complex human emotions and motivations—an old woman's loneliness and isolation and the blending of fear and sympathy for the spirits of the dead in 'Old Agnete', a mother's grief over the illegitimate child who won't be buried in her husband's family tomb in 'The Inscription On the Grave'. Really good stuff!
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Date: Mar. 9th, 2020 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Mar. 10th, 2020 05:59 pm (UTC)