Belmonte by John Bradley

  This book was quite good once it got going, but what an odd start!   It was supposed to be about four men emigrating from 16th century Portugal to the New World, and, yes, it *was* about that, once it got going … but the early part was totally bizarre, with Endovelico (an ancient Portuguese god) turning two of the boys into falcons, so that they could visit Joseph (of amazong technicolour dreamcoat fame) in ancient Egypt and then late 15th century Portuguese explorers travelling to Ethiopia.   The Ethiopia bit was interesting, because it’s an aspect of the “Voyages of Discovery” which gets overlooked, but I’m not sure why it had to be shown via an ancient god turning people into falcons.  And I’ve no idea what Joseph had to do with any of it!

Once we got back to normality, there was a lot of “mystical” talk about a) the Portuguese interest in the Templars, b) the legend of Prester John and c) the Kabbalah, but that was fair enough for a book set in 16th century Portugal.   And we got two main stories – that of Ruy and Davide, two young Jewish friends who went to study at the University of Coimbra but were forced to flee by the Inquisition, and that of Juancinto, a Spanish gitano who accidentally killed someone and was transported (I’m not sure that transportation was a thing in 16th century Spain, but never mind) to the New World.   There was a fourth man, Daniele, son of a Moorish father and Jewish mother, but he appeared at the beginning and didn’t reappear until the end, by which time I’d forgotten about him!

I was a bit uneasy about some of the talk concerning secret organisations, which just seemed a bit too close to international conspiracy theories for comfort, but generally it was an interesting book, and I’m hoping to read the sequel if I ever get my TBR pile down to manageable levels!

The Wizard of Oz – Palace Theatre, Manchester

  You know the story.  And you know the main songs – Over The Rainbow, Follow The Yellow Brick Road, We’re Off To See The Wizard – although there are a few new-ish ones added in by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.   The actual plot sticks pretty closely to the book and the 1939 film, and all the characters are played superbly.  It’s particularly nice to see Jason Manford as the Cowardly Lion, as he’s only in the Manchester shows 🙂 .

However, a lot of special effects have been added in – mostly cinematographic stuff.   The Yellow Brick Road now has roadworks signs, which made me laugh, and the Emerald City (New York) has coffee shops called Ozbucks.   Also, there are a few new jokes thrown in.  When you think about, the Tin Man asking complete strangers to oil him is a bit … er, odd!   And the Lion proclaims loudly that he is a Friend of Dorothy.

It’s a very entertaining night out, and, even on a Thursday, it was a sell out.  Highly recommended!

 

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

This was my “reading challenge” book for April.  Eight people were invited to an island off the coast of Devon, where they were met by the supposed hosts’ butler and housekeeper.   Then they all got murdered, in (extremely unlikely) ways which tied in with “Ten Little Soldier Boys” – the original title of the book having been changed in more recent editions.   And it turned out that one of them had murdered the others, because he thought they’d all got away with crimes.   Er, and that’s all I’ve got to say about that.   Murder mysteries aren’t really my thing!

Philippa of Lancaster by Isabel Stilwell

  It is stupidly hard to find books in English about Portuguese royals!   There are quite a few available about French, Austrian, Russian and Castilian royals, but pretty much nothing about Portuguese royals.  However, we do have the English translations of Isabel Stilwell’s books, although the paper copies are prohibitively expensive and even the Kindle versions aren’t cheap.  Philippa of Lancaster was, of course, actually an English royal – the eldest daughter of John of Gaunt and eldest sister of Henry IV – who married Joao I, the first Avis king of Portugal, sealing the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, which is the longest bilateral alliance still in existence 🙂 .   So we are eternal friends with the land of Bruno Fernandes, Diogo Dalot and pasteis de nata.

It has to be said that there are quite a few oddities in translation, and also that there are some errors relating to English titles and to the spelling of personal names and place names.   However, those aside, this is a fascinating book.

John of Gaunt himself doesn’t feature that much, and even Joao isn’t that significant.  Most of the emphasis is on the women.  Apart from Philippa herself, the main characters are her sister Elizabeth, the eponymous heroine of Anne O’Brien’s The King’s Sister, and John of Gaunt’s mistress, Katherine Swynford.  Thanks to Anya Seton, everyone sees Katherine as a romantic heroine, and that’s how she comes across in this book – she and Philippa do seem to have been quite close.   Funny how the modern view of Katherine is pretty much entirely based on that book!   And, for centuries, the view of Henry IV has been based on Shakespeare’s version of him: he comes across more positively in this book.   Philippa’s stepmother, Costanza of Castile (whose name is spelt “Constanza” in this) and half-sister Catilina, by contrast, don’t come across well at all.  And Ines de Castro, Joao’s father’s mistress, who’s romanticised in Portugal, doesn’t come across very well either – although she’d died before Philippa got to Portugal.

So – Philippa’s story.  She was the eldest child of John of Gaunt and the much-loved Blanche of Lancaster, but was largely brough up by Katherine Swynford after Blanche’s death.   For various reasons, no marriage was arranged for her until she was 27, which was pretty much on the shelf for a princess.   However, her marriage to Joao was successful, and they had six surviving children, known as the “Illustrious Generation” in Portugal; and Philippa seems to have been a very intelligent and also generally very nice woman.    Chaucer, Katherine’s brother-in-law, also features a lot in the book, as Philippa’s friend and mentor.

She comes across very well in the book, and we see crucial times in both England, with the Peasants’ Revolt and then Richard II’s deposition by Henry IV, and Portugal, as the Anglo-Portuguese forces defeated Joao’s Castilian rivals and ended a period of anarchy.  The book ends just before Portugal’s conquest of Ceuta, which came a month after Philippa’s death from the plague, and arguably kicked off the “Age of Discovery”.

All in all, it’s a fascinating book.  I’d love to read more of Isabel Stilwell’s books, but the few which have been translated into English are just *so* expensive … er, and my Portuguese isn’t up to much more than ordering a pastel de nata …

Andreas Hofer by Luise Muhlbach

I really enjoyed this book, published in 1868.   As the title indicates, it’s about the Tyrolean Rebellion during the Napoleonic Wars, when France defeated Austria and put Tyrol under Bavarian rule.   OK, it depicts Hofer as a great hero, and doesn’t go into the issue of his being something of a religious bigot; but he *is* very much venerated as a folk hero in Tyrol.

It depicts the historical events pretty much accurately, but the main character isn’t actually Hofer, but a (presumably fictitious?) young woman called Eliza Wallner.   Eliza is a peasant girl who is friends with an aristocratic girl, confusingly called Elsa, whose family have lived in Tyrol for many years but are originally from Bavaria.  Both Eliza and Elsa are in love with Elsa’s cousin, a Bavarian soldier – who initially says that, although he loves Eliza, he can’t marry her because of the difference in their social status, but later changes his mind.   Eliza knows that his family won’t accept her, and self-sacrificingly arranges for him to marry Elsa.  She also saves his life, and carries out all manner of other heroics during the course of the war, and is generally a long way removed from most Victorian heroines!

It really is a very entertaining book, and very easy to read.   Recommended!

Katherine of Aragon by Alison Weir

This is a really good read, even if it’s an unoriginal take on an unoriginal topic.   It’s told from the viewpoint of Katherine (the author uses the K spelling) of Aragon, so it’s very much #TeamKatherine and blames Anne Boleyn for everything under the sun – but, fair enough, that’s doing what it says on the tin.   I think the author sometimes struggles a bit to get across the religious feelings of the time and how horrified Katherine must have felt, annulment (the term “divorce” is used, but “annulment” would be more accurate) aside, about Henry’s decision to break with Rome, but it *is* very hard to get that across in today’s secular world.

It’s a shame that the book didn’t show anything of Katherine’s childhood in Castile, but it does an excellent job of showing her marriage to Arthur, the horrible time she had afterwards, and then the ups and downs of her marriage to Henry, including the tragic loss of so many babies.

Henry very much comes across as a tyrant by the time of Katherine’s death – which is fair enough.   And the book takes the traditional view that the marriage of Katherine and Arthur was never consummated, and that Arthur was in poor health even before they married.   I’m very much inclined to agree about the former.   We just don’t know about the latter – some people think he had TB, others think that he was healthy and was just unlucky enough to catch something like the sweating sickness.

There’s a suggestion that Katherine thinks her first marriage is cursed, because it was brought about in blood.   I did wonder if that was going to be a load of Ricardian drivel (sorry, Ricardians!) blaming Henry for the death of the Princes in the Tower, but it seemed instead to refer to the execution of the Earl of Warwick.   Margaret Pole features prominently in the book, as too does Maud Parr – a reminder of the connection between Katherine of Aragon and Katherine Parr.    Most things are pretty accurate, albeit pretty biased, and the book’s well-written, as Alison Weir’s books always are, and generally a joy to read.  I got her book about Henry VIII on a 99p Kindle download a few months back, but, given that I’ve got eleventy billion books waiting to be read and it’s over 700 pages long, it’s having to wait for now!   I’ve got the Anne Boleyn book, though, and look forward to seeing that tell the story from a very different angle.

 

Pilgrimage: the road through North Wales – BBC 2

  As much as I like North Wales, I wasn’t convinced about the choice of route for this year’s series, purely because it isn’t a historical pilgrimage route like the Camino.  However, a lot of “big” pilgrimage sites aren’t very historical at all.  I’m older than the shrine at Medjugorje!    And this one does include some “proper” historical sites, like Holywell and Bardsey Island.

I must go to Holywell again some time, and wander around in the pool properly, like the “celebs” (I’ve used inverted commas because I’d never even heard of some of them, and I only knew others because they’re related to genuinely famous people) in the first episode is.   There were about three other people there when I stopped off on the way back from Bodnant Garden once, so at least it was quiet!

Bodnant Garden actually features on the pilgrimage route, which is a bit weird because it’s a garden, not a religious site.  But then, gardens are a lot more peaceful than religious sites, so probably a lot better for the soul.

The North Wales Pilgrims’ Way (I am appalled by the lack of an apostrophe on its website) was only “invented” in 2011.  It’s fascinating how pilgrimage routes are becoming a “thing” again.  Honestly, if I weren’t so fat and unfit, and if I got more time off work, I would love to walk the Camino … not because of anything to do with religion, but just to get that bit of time out and getting your head together, in a troubled world.

I was somewhat bemused that Spencer Matthews didn’t know that Jesus was a real person.   What do they charge at Eton these days, about £50,000 per annum?   And they turn out people who don’t know that Jesus was a real person?   That’s really very worrying!   Michaela Strachan, who takes me back to the ’80s, spoke a lot more sense, talking about placing faith in the natural world, whilst Sonali Shah and Tom Rosenthal also made some interesting points.

It’s the sixth series of Pilgrimage now, and the fact that it’s lasted so long shows that there’s genuine interest in this idea of taking time out and thinking about things.   There’s a lot going on at the moment, and we’re all trying to make some sense of the world.   I look forward to watching the rest of this series.

 

 

The Famous Five: Peril on the Night Train – CBBC

  If the BBC want to make adventure programmes for kids, that’s very nice … but it’s really annoying that they’ve used the name “Famous Five” and the names of *the* Famous Five for stories which have got virtually nothing to *do* with the Famous Five!   This one had some loose connections to Five Go Adventuring Again in that it involved a tutor called Mr Roland trying to steal Uncle Quentin’s work.   Was that the book which kept going on about blueprints?   If so, I remember reading it when I was about 6, and taking it to mean that Uncle Quentin did all his work on blue paper.  Maybe he did!

In this version of events, Uncle Quentin was in the process of inventing a machine which could “decode everything”.   Yep, yet again, the BBC seemed to have got the Famous Five mixed up with Indiana Jones, The Da Vinci Code or possibly both.  They’d also chucked in a bit of Agatha Christie, with mysterious goings-on on a sleeper train, and a dash of Nancy Drew, with people being drugged.  And even an element of Dallas, in that one of the baddies had a stetson and a southern drawl.  (Baddies should not have southern drawls.  I like southern drawls.  However, there were German baddies as well.)   Plus there was a scene in which the Five got stranded in the Scottish Highlands and were seen walking over a mountain, which had echoes of the end of The Sound of Music.   And the Loch Ness Monster made an appearance.  So it was certainly eclectic!

As in the first episode, Anne was too young, Dick had mysteriously turned into a geek, George wasn’t stroppy enough and Julian wasn’t annoying enough.  Well, he was really, really annoying when he said “gotten away with it” instead of “got away with it”, but that was the scriptwriters’ fault, not his.  “Gotten,” FFS.  Ugh!!

However, if you tried to ignore the fact that a programme called “The Famous Five” had absolutely nothing to do with the Famous Five, it was really quite entertaining.   It had a proper historical context, with a lot of talk about war coming and the need not to let Germany gain any technological advances (although it was odd that Anne seemed so keen on TV, which wasn’t exactly a big thing pre-war).  The scenes of “peril” on board the night train (which was a train to the Scottish Highlands) were actually quite good, and Dick’s geekiness worked well in terms of being able to pick up a Morse code signal from a radio/wireless.   And, apart from the reference to the machine being able to decode everything – and, to be fair, it sounded more like an Enigma machine than the sort of thing featured in Indiana Jones films – it was generally a lot more realistic than the first episode.  No caves caving in!

It ended up with the kids cleverly outwitting the baddies and outsmarting the Army.  That felt more Five Find-Outers than Famous Five, although I’m not sure that Enid Blyton would have allowed any of her characters to outwit a posh army officer (outwitting Mr Goon was OK, because he was common), but it was certainly Blyton-esque.  I wish that the BBC had stuck with some of the original Blyton storylines, but I did genuinely enjoy this.

 

 

Above Suspicion by Helen MacInnes

  This is a spy story, set in 1939 and published in 1941.  I read it because part of it’s set in Pertisau, and, with the obvious exception of the Chalet School books, there don’t seem to be any other English language novels set in Pertisau, apart from The Constant Nymph.  Oxford couple Richard and Frances Myles are asked by a friend in the Foreign Office to try to find out what’s happened to an underground network smuggling people out of the Third Reich, in the guide of tourists travelling to Paris, then on to Germany and Austria … as you do.   It involves a lot of strange code solving and wearing of flowers on hats, and there are suspicious people following their every move … mainly the hotel chambermaids.   They also keep bumping into the same friendly people everywhere.  Then Frances is kidnapped by some Nazis from the Hofkirche in Innsbruck, of all places, but is dramatically rescued, and they go home via Italy.

Spy stories aren’t really my thing, unless they involve James Bond.   I’m not really into all that let’s go into a cafe and when you pretend to knock a drink over then someone will show you his watch and you have to meet him tomorrow at an hour later than the watch shows stuff (keep up!).   But it was readable enough.  And it mentioned Pertisau.