Daily horrors whenever one catches up with the news, both on a global and national level, makes for an increasing need to find some way to fannishly relax. (Mind you, there are no safe zones from current day insanity in fandom, either. Some weeks ago yours truly was horrified to learn the claim that the Orange Felon supposedly likes Sunset Boulevard, one of Billy Wilder's masterpieces. I'm still in denial about that - maybe he just likes some songs from ALW's musical version? How would he even have the patience and focus to watch an entire movie with no action scenes, no sex scenes and lots and lots of sharp dialogue, not to mention no macho hero in sight? What Billy Wilder, who as a young man watched the country he was in go from a Republic to a fascist state, but who was with all cynisim pretty idealistic about the US where he found refuge would have said about the present, I don't want to imagine. At the very least, he'd demand a rewrite. I mean: like all VPs during the Munich security conference, the current one a few days ago visited Dachau. I'm not exaggerating, it is what every single US VP attending the Munich security conference has done. Like the rest of them, Vance got a guided tour by one of the few still living survivors. If it filtered through that Dachau, one of the very first German concentration camps which when it was built and put to work in 1933 included as its very first inmates Social Democrats, Union Representatives and Communists, i.e. the very people Elon Musk and Alice Weidel (Germany's Marine Le Pen wannabe) declared to be Nazis to an audience of billions, Vance didn't say. Instead, he went from visiting a concentration camp to meeting Weidel, i.e. the leading woman of a certified right extremist (or if you want to be less polite, Neonazi) party, and then held forth at the conference where he claimed to defend free speech (you know, while his boss kicks out reporters daring to say "Gulf of Mexico" and erases trans people out of existence) and told Europeans they're the true anti democratic dictators and should work with their Nazi parties already.

Billy Wilder, at his most cynical, would not have written such caricatures as are currently in charge of dismantling democracy not just in the US but nearly everywhere. Btw, the retort by our current secretary for defense, Boris Pistorius, was this:





Aaanyway. I find history podcasts not just interesting in general but at such times as these oddly comforting in a "this, too, shall pass" way. (I am not referring to the history of the 20th century, of course. That currently provides a "this, too, shall come back" vibe.) Since it's been a while, some impressions on my English language favourites:

History of Byzantium: got into something of a depressive slump after the sacking of Constantinople in 1204, but that's history, and it is now back to the narrative. (Decline-and-fall-like as it has to be.)

Not just the Tudors: continues to be very entertaining, and most guest speakers Susannah Libscombe interviews are good, with the occasional dud; most recently there excellent episodes on the various males of the Borgia family, and then for Lucrezia she changed her interview partner and alas her new interviewee was, shall we say, less than stellar.


History of the Germans: has since last I wrote been reordered so there are thematic seasons, i.e. if you're just interested in, say, the Ottonians or the Hanseatic League, you can listen to just those seasons. On a personal level, my experience with this podcast has been that the seasons that deal with parts of history I'm not so familiar with captivate me more than those I do already know a lot about, but not because the later is badly researched (au contraire), it's just that I love getting intrigued and learning more. So of course I have favourites. In the recent year, I loved the Interregnum season (starring among others Rudolf von Habsburg, the first Emperor of that family, going from simple count to HRE buy "waving a marriage contract in one hand and a sword in the other" as he tactically married his many female relations to lots of dying-out-older nobility, Ludwig the Bavarian (proving that getting excommunicated by the (Avignon) Pope is no longer the big deal it used to be as he employs, as Dirk puts it, half the cast of The Name of the Rose, and Karl IV, he after whom the bridge and a lot of other things in Prague are named after) and the current season, The Reformation before the Reformation, which you get the whole late medieval enchilade of corrupt popes and antipopes, the Council of Konstanz (good for book swapping, not so good for actual radical reforms, ask Jan Hus, who gets burned during it) and then the Hussite Revolution in Bohemia.

Revolutions: Mike Duncan's second podcast which used to be finished with the Russian Revolution but now has been resumed by him with a highly entertaining sci fi season, the Martian Revolution. Its backstory sounds a bit inspired by The Expanse as well as lots of the historical revolutions he has covered. If the CEO of OmniCorps whose blinkered know-it-all-ness, ego and lack of anything resembling human empahy triggered the Martian Revolution sounds a bit like a current tech bro in charge of the White House, I'm sure it's entirely coincidental.

Firebrand was available on a streaming service I have, so I could watch the movie I missed in the theatres, the first one focused on Katherine Parr. (Despite the gazillion of Tudor media products out there already.) Overall: two thirds of the movie are very good. The rest felt to me like it was veering into counterfactiual melodrama in a way that's condescending to the audience (i.e. I couldn't help but suspect the changes were because the film creative team - said deviation isn't in the novel the movie is based on - didn't trust its audience to understand how dangerous and high stakes the real situation was), but your mileage may differ. In any case: the performances were fantastic, both Alicia Vikander as Katherine Parr and Jude Law as Henry VIII., and the costumes were gorgeous and actually period accurate, for both women and men. No women running around in modern hair styles and vaguely late 19th century dresses, and the guys actually have all those unbecoming-to-the-modern-eye lengthy beards. Extra point for the use of period music, especially Henry's "Pasttime in good Company", in a way that's highly characterisation- and plot relevant.

( Spoilery details with praise and critique )

Dear Trick or Treater,

we share at least one fandom, which is great, and I’m really grateful to you for writing a trick or treat for me. All the prompts are just suggestions; if you have very different ideas featuring the same central characters, go for them. Also, I enjoy a broad range from fluff to angst, so whatever suits you best works fine with me.



DNW:

- bashing of canon pairings or characters in general. By which I don't mean the characters have to like each and everyone - a great number of those I've nominated can be described as prickly jerks, among other things, and it would be entirely ic for them to say something negative about people they canonically can't stand - but there's a difference between that and the narrative giving me the impression to go along with said opinions.

- Alpha/Beta/Omega scenarios, watersports, infantilisation. Really not my thing, sorry.


Likes:

- flirting/seduction via wordplay and banter (if it works for you with the characters in question)

- for the darker push/pull dynamics: moments of tenderness and understanding in between the fighting/one upman shipping (without abandoning the anger)

- for the pairings, both romantic and non-romantic, that are gentler and harmonious by nature: making it clear each has their own life and agenda as well

- some humor amidst the angst (especially if the character in question displays it in canon)


The question of AUs: depends. "What if this key canon event did not happen?" can lead to great character and dynamics exploration, some of which made it into my specific prompts, but I do want to recognize the characters. Half of those I nominated are from historical canons, and the history is part of the fascination the canon has for me. ) However, if you feel inspired to, say, write Maria Theresa, space captain, and manage to do it in a way that gives me gripping analogues to the historical situations: be my guest!

How much or how little sex: I'm cool with anything you feel comfortable with, from detailed sex to the proverbial fade out after a kiss. Or no sex at all (case in point: several of the non-romantic relationships I nominated), as long as the story explores the emotional dynamics in an intense way.

( Babylon 5 )

( Matthew Shardlake Series )

( 18th Century RPF )


( The Last Kingdom )

( Josephus Trilogy - Lion Feuchtwanger )

A first crop of Yuletide stories I loved:

Historical Fiction:

And flies with Swallow's Wings: Scenes from a London cookshop. This is a great take on one of the more intriguing anecdotes re: Anne Neville and Richard III, and to say more would spoil the story.

Periapsides: Five things Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn could have been to each other.

An action for reclaiming an inheritance: in which Terentia hires a lawyer, young Cicero, to represent her in a lawsuit, and I absolutely adore this take on her - and everyone else who shows up in this tale set in the last years of Sulla's reign.

Andor:

All Blue and Gold and Glittering:
In search of a present for Mon Mothma, Tay Kolma pays a visit to an antiques shop he’s been told she’s fond of.

There is a World beyond this Place: Twelve things Cassian Andor misses most in prison.

The Body/Stand By Me:

Summer in the City In the summer of 1964, Chris gets Gordie to come with him on a different kind of adventure.

A Christmas Carol:

The Price of Salvation: The fate of his old partner who after all saved Scrooge is not something Scrooge just accepts. Especially since the ghost of Jacob Marley keeps coming back...


The Expanse:

A Fresh Start: in which Drummer and Avasarala learn to deal with each other.

Ten Lullabies: great ensemble portrait through the theme of lullabies.

After I read Matthew Kneale's "Rome in Seven Sackings" book, algorithms reccommended this one to me, which is explainable by the subtitle: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe”

On the plus side - and this is a huge plus - it's very entertaining to read, breezily written, and Norwich deserves credit for showing how European history in the era he picked was an interwoven tapestry instead of a one-country-standing-alone saga and how the politics of the four rulers he picked shaped and influenced each other. Extra bonus for making Suleiman one of the four and hammering home how the expansion of the Ottoman Empire was a huge factor especially in the HRE (Holy Roman Empire) versus France struggles, and for doing a decent job of explaining the various Popes and their own widely different policies during the era in question.

Part of what makes the volume so easy to read is unfortunately also a downside if you want to take it as history. Norwich hasn't met a salacious story he doesn't like, and he doesn't believe in source naming, for the most part, let alone evidence checking. I mean, I sympathize: when it comes to historical fiction, I go with the most sensational often, too. But the book is labeled non-fiction, and thus it has to be held to certain standards. Norwich being opinionated is one thing: he has his faves, and isn't shy of showing it, so Katherine of Aragon is the best of Henry's wives bar none, Catherine Parr comes near but only almost, which makes her still "better than all four of her predecessors in Henry's bed put together", Suleiman's favourite wife Roxelane/Hürrem Sultan doesn't deserve the great tomb she got, Charles' son Philip (II, of Spain) must have been a disappointment to his father since Norwich finds him dull and less intelligent than Dad (sidenote: not what Charles said about Philip! just what Norwich thinks he ought to have felt), and so on. You can argue with those opinions, but I'm actually relieved he's open about them instead of being coy. Where I do feel he could have at least made some effort in source checking or hey, footnoting, is when he comes up with some genuine howlers, like claiming Mary (I, daughter of Henry and Catherine) had her father's body secretly dragged out of his tomb and burned, because he was a heretic. This certainly would have been news to the people who in 1813 when some reconstruction of the chapel was due found Henry VIII's earthly remains very much unburned where they were supposed to be.

Carried away with Anne Boleyn dislike ("nobody liked her, by the end not even Henry"), he also states we will never know whether or not she had sex with any or all of those men she was accused with. Well, you can't prove a negative, Norwich, sure, but we do know at least she can't have had sex with several of them on the dates where Cromwell said she did, since she and the guys weren't even in the same palace but miles and miles away from each other. On other dates, she'd only recently given birth, which doesn't make it impossible, but certainly less than likely. Not that you'd know as much when reading Norwich's book.

Turkish history isn't my forte, but even some quick googling informs me that Norwich's other least favourite concubine-gone-wife, Hürrem Sultan/Roxelane, also is blamed by him for some things she can't have done. To quote from another review: She is described as being the one behind Grand Vizier Ibrahim's "assassination" (which is completely wrong since Ibrahim was executed on Suleyman's orders inside Topkapi Palace and not in his palace, where Norwich says that the blood stains were visible for three years) because she coveted his position for her son-in-law Rüstem Pasha (too bad that Rüstem wasn't her son-in-law in 1536, as he married Mihrimah Sultan only in 1539. Plus, it would take him years to finally become Grand Vizier). Of course she is also blamed for Mustafa's death (because why not) but especially for his young son Murad's? First of all, Mustafa's young son was called Mehmed, Murad was Selim's son, and secondly Mehmed was executed because the sons of executed princes were executed too. So it wasn't Hürrem Sultan who ordered his execution, but Suleyman. She couldn't have ordered someone's execution, she didn't have that power.

As for the Habsburgs starring in this volume: Norwich does a reasonably good job on Charles himself (confessing in the preface he used to dismiss and dislike him as a boy for being German, what with WWII going on in his childhood, but learning more about him - including the fact he was only one quarter German and culturally Burgundian, having grown up in today's Belgium, and then he made himself into a Spaniard - he warmed up to him), but is going for cyphers for the rest of the clan. Which is a let down because there were some fascinating women among them. Between Charles' aunt Margaret of Austria, who negotiated some key treaties between Charles and his arch nemesis Francis, and was called the best diplomat of her era, his sister Mary of Hungary (given that Hungary's near total conquest by the Ottomans is a huge factor in this book, there was more than enough reason to include her in more than by namechecking), who succeeded Margaret of Austria as governor of the Netherlands, did her valiant best in mediating between Charles and brother Ferdinand when the two clashed over the succession, and once got into hot water for letting Luther dedicate a book to her, and Charles' illegitimate daughter Margaret of Parma (who'd govern the Netherlands in Philip's time), there was ample material to explore, but alas, they don't get the page time devoted to Henry's marital shenanigans. About Charles' oldest sister, Eleanor, who was married first to King Manuel of Portugal and then to his enemy Francis I. of France in a vain attempt to help ending that particular feud, Norwich only says (twice) that she was plain and had a "curious absence of personality". Well, Norwich, sure, if you leave out anything that could have made her more dimensional, such as her youthful love affair with Friedrich of the the Palatinate (a love letter of his to her was caught, resulting in Charles breaking up the two since he needed Eleanor for politics), or the heartrendering story of how she tried to see the daughter from her first marriage and waited for three weeks for said daughter to show up at a pre-arranged meeting, only to be snubbed. When Eleanor died, Charles said sadly that she was his elder by fifteen months and he didn't think it would be as long till he followed her, which turned out to be correct; Eleanor, Charles and Mary of Hungary all died within a year from each other, with Mary following her siblings. They'd grown up together at Margaret's court in Mechelen and thus were seen as the "Flemish siblings", while their younger siblings, Ferdinand and Catherine, who had grown up in Spain were the "Spaniards", and the life long closeness of the elders hailed from there. How does this show up in Norwich's book? By his stating with some surprise that Charles and Mary "genuinely grieved for their plain sibling".

I'm getting carried away myself now. Back to praise: for all that putting Henry first in the subtitle - since this is a book marketed at an English speaking audience, this makes sense - , Norwich does a great job illuminating everyone's pov, i.e. you hear as much about how Charles and Francis saw each other and why each felt threatened by and the need to contain the other, or why Suleiman made it all the way to Vienna and was stopped there, from his pov, not just from the Austrians. He points out that Suleiman, executed relations and offspring and beheaded enemies not withstanding, actually was more "tolerant" in the modern sense than any of the three Christian monarchs when it came to religion, as long as his subjects recognized him as their overlord. And he's not shy in pointing out how futile Henry VIII's French wars were, a throwback to the Middle Ages. (Basically: Henry wanting to be Henry V. and have his very own Agincourt. He really really wasn't, and he really really didn't.) Mind you, Norwich thinks Henry should have put that money and effort into overseas "exploration" (read: colonisation) instead, in which he showed no interest, because then "parts of South America would speak English today". Which tells you something about Norwich. And he's almost endearingly unabashed in his Catherine of Aragon fanboying. (A far better scholar in Latin than Henry, as even Henry had to admit! A ruler! Best Queen Consort ever!) Like I said, I don't mind, I just wish he'd given more page time to the other fascinating ladies of the era as well.

Conclusion: if you want to know more about the era and be entertained at the same time, this is a good start. Just don't take it as gospel but, once your interest has awoken, check out other sources, too.

Quite often, history makes you wonder "what if?" more or less frivolously. In this story, the author creates a scenario in which young Elizabeth Tudor, not her older sister Mary, marries Philip of Spain. The result is a delightful story without villains and with a future Renaissance power couple in the making. Also it's a slow burn with a good pay off. Hugely enjoyable:


Love is a stranger who'll beckon you on


Like many, I'm using using the year and more of pandemic lockdowns to watching theatre and opera performances available online. Two I watched recently were:


Attila by Guisseppe Verdi, performed by the Sofia Opera in Bulgaria.(In the original Italian, subtitled in English.) Attila is one of the less well known Verdi operas and I won't pretend it's a long lost master piece, but it's perfect if you want hilstorical melodrama with some great music. Also, when a more mature Verdi wanted to kill off royalty (or have that at least attempted) on stage he had to change kings into dukes (Rigoletto) or into governors of Masaschusetts (Un Ballo di Maschera), but good old Attila the Hun could be plotted against under his own name. The tenor hero is as obnoxious, but he's also not around that much. Whereas Attila has duets with his frenemy, Roman general Ezio (Aetius), and Odabella, the soprano, is that rarity, a woman committing murder in an opera who doesn't die, or comit suicide, or becomes insane.

Straus & Strauss & Co. is a gala performed at the Gärtner Opera here in Munich, in which the singers present a melange of Rossini, Verdi, the two Straus(s) from the title and lots of Lehar. Because it was performed under covid conditions, the choir is located in various boxes in the theatre, standing up and singing to support the solists when required, which is amazingly effective. Also the singers are great. I watched it last night and it was just what I needed.

Aka the third and final volume of Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy. Overall: the same virtues and flaws as the two previous installments. The prose is still elegant and intense. Mantel can be fantastic with both black humor, from on early set piece onward, the conversation between Jane Seymour, her brothers and Cromwell after her wedding night with Henry, in which you're never quite sure Jane (Mantel's Jane is still the most interesting fictional Jane Seymour in Tudor literature) isn't trolling the men in order to make them squirm. And the way she describes the horrible violence of the era somehow manages to be both visceral and never feel voyeuristic or for shock effect, or the opposite, violence between treated as "well, that was how things were" and therefore to be shrugged off; cases in point being an execution by burning Cromwell watches (not in flashback, as in Wolf Hall, but in the present) and of course the ending of her novel. Because Hilary Mantel stays with Cromwell's pov all the way, through his ending. His ending being - ( a spoiler for history, but come on ) it's a horrid and yet fantastic symmetry achieved. Not to mention that not many writers would have the confidence to write this particular event from the pov of the participant and manage to pull it off in a way that feels real.

Flaws: well, as expected. Mantel's Thomas Cromwell is more haunted in this last installment, with the dead Anne Boleyn and the five men who died with her being on his mind long after after Henry's already looking for wife No.4, but he's still Cromwell Our Contemporary, kind to children, championing women, a Renaissance superhero fluent in most European languages (it's a big surprise when he admits that he only knows a little German, picked up from Nuremberg merchants in Venice), always outwitting everyone else (until events out of his control overtake him), with not a single Renaissance attitude that would sit uncomfortably with the reader.

( Nitpicking away, because history is a thing )


( Back to praise of characters and characterisation again )

C.J. Sansom: Tombland: The latest adventure in the Matthew Shardlake mysteries. While the previous outing, Lamentation, would have made for a good conclusion, I had an inkling we might not have seen the last of Matthew and friends due to the job he takes at the very end of it. (Property lawyer for *Spoiler*.) And indeed it was not, though one of my major guesses, that if Sansom continues his series, the next book will feature the death of Catherine Parr and Thomas Seymour subsequently losing his head in more than onse sense in a major way, turned out to be incorrect: the consequences of Seymour’s actions to *Spoiler* and Matthew Shardlake are dealt with in the opening chapter of Tombland. The rest of the novel takes place a few months later in the same year, and the big political event of the novel is the rebellion in Norfolk.

One of Sansom’s most estimable traits – which differentiates him from the zillion of other writers setting their novels in the era of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I or even during the years in between – is that he really brings home what ordinary citizens lived like and what the consequences of all those back-and-thro religious changes (one year’s heresy being next year’s orthodoxy, and vice versa) were, as well as the consequences of Henry’s costly (and ineffectual) wars. The last novel, Lamentation was a bit atypical in that because Shardlake’s main client there was Catherine Parr, the cast was more noble-heavy than usual. This novel, otoh, goes in the other direction: the nobility (including the royal part of same) only makes cameo appearances, while the brewing rebellion – due to years and years of Henrician mismanagment followed up by two years of, in this telling, more mismanagment by Edward Seymour – and the poverty and countless injustices it hails from is told via the our hero, who visits Norwich due to *Spoiler* sending him there to assist a distant relation accused of murder, ending up with the rebels.

(He still solves the case, though, which gets much more prominence than last novel’s murder got, and is skillfully interwoven with the political plot – Matthew Shardlake meets many of the later players via said case first.)

The various new characters in Norfolk are vividly drawn, and despite the end being obvious (even if you’ve never heard of this particular rebellion before, you’re probably aware the reign of Edward VI didn’t include reforms that wouldn’t happen in England until Cromwell, O, not T), I came to care a lot about them and dreaded what was bound to happen. But of course I remained majorly invested in our recurring cast. Lamentation ended with a big rift due to the events in that novel, which continues into to this one, but eventually ( a pleasing spoilery event takes place. ) Moreover, the new kid on the block, Nicholas, continues to be a good addition to the cast – he’s different from Barak as Shardlake’s assistant both due to his (gentry) background and his character, he gets character development and growth in this novel, and because of his background, his pov on the rebellion early on is really different from Matthew’s and Barak’s without Nicholas being vilified for this.

Another strength of these novels is that the humanity of our hero remains strong: he’s the only one who doesn’t lose sight of the murder victim and what she’s been through when most other characters are far more invested in the results her death had.

Nitpicks: at one point, Matthew is told an information which some pages later is told to him again and treated as news by our narrator, which made me wonder whether Sansom’s editor didn’t catch it or whether Matthew was uncharacteristically obtuse regarding what „he interfered with her“ means in the context it’s told.

Also, it’s a rule in this series that Matthew will always dislike the girls his assistants fall in love with first, even if he later changes his mind about them. Look, author, at some point, you’re starting to look coy about what we’re supposed to take from this tendency.

Best in-joke for the Tudor lore wise: very late in the novel, it’s mentioned in conversation that the Earl of Warwick’s younger son Robert has met a girl in Norfolk, „old Robsart’s daughter“, whom he wants to marry. This has nothing to do with anything in the novel and is just idle gossip of no interest to our hero, but his source adds the obligatory „marry young, regret later“ comment in case you’ve missed which future famous historical mystery has just been set up.

In conclusion: the series remains top quality, and I look forward to the next one.

On to events a century earlier:

Day 20 ~ What do you like best about The Medici?

Like The Borgias in their heyday (i.e. the first two seasons), it provides me with interesting characters and complex relationships which now and then even fit really well with their historical context, even if just as often fantasy rules, and does this in exceedingly beautiful Renaissance surroundings.

( The other days )

A couple of weeks ago I complained in my review of The Last Hours about the all too popular tendency in many a historical fiction (books, tv, film) to provide all the sympathetic characters with values and attitudes deemed agreeable to a current day reader, and leave anything else (i.e. values, beliefs etc. sharply divergent from the present day) to the antagonists. Now, one objection people sometimes raise is that if you present a historical character sympathetic who endorses absolutism/gender hierarchy/persecution of people not sharing the same faith/insert historical attitude here/, it could come across as endorsement. In the spirit of constructive criticism, I’d like to share some historical short stories illustrating you can, in fact, write a character sympathetic (and not in a „sympathetic villain to heroic antagonist“ way) while getting across that some of her beliefs (and later acts) were horrendously harmful to a great many people. The writer who does this in a cycle of short stories, though each can be read on its own, picked Mary (I.) Tudor to do this, and I have to say, Mary is ideal for the purpose. Her youth was extremely traumatic through no fault of her own, her courage through her years of powerlessness is undeniable…and her attempt to turn England back into a Catholic realm by any means once she was crowned doomed from the start, turning her from a beloved-by-her-people figure into one loathed in a very short time. I like all the stories, but here are some special favourites:

Dare not call you father: „May-June 1536. Mary's journey from high hopes to fear to abject humiliation“ is how the author sums it up. Until Anne Boleyn’s execution, Mary had the psychological out of blaming solely Anne, not her father, for all the abuse she’d undergone in the preceding years. After Anne’s death, Henry VIII. rabidly disabused Mary of that notion, as he kept insisting that his oldest daughter recognized him as head of the English church, that she recognized her own bastardy and the invalidity of her parents‘ marriage, and even stepped up the pressure, until Mary finally caved, something she never forgave herself for. The story does a great job of covering this key period in Mary’s life.

Was it God’s will?: focuses on Mary going from starting her reign full of hope and with much of the population cheering her to signing the death warrant of her cousin Jane Grey, the Nine-Day-Queen, while protests and conspiracies abound. What I find most striking in this story is Mary realising that Jane is in many ways her younger self’s mirror image: „Now she is the tyrant, holding her pen above a young woman’s death warrant, ready to condemn her for obeying her parents and clinging to the beliefs that, all her life, she has been taught to uphold.“

Hands: this one covers the entirety of Mary’s life, from birth to death, in short, poignant vignettes.

Lastly, a story from another writer and of a Yuletide past, which to my mind is a fantastic depiction of Philip II. of Spain, married to Mary for a brief while, which did her no favours, and then in a life long cold and hot war with her sister Elizabeth, which, however, may or may not have started on a very different note, if the legend of Philip confessing on his death bed that during his short time in England, he fell for Elizabeth has any veracity to it:

Todos los bienes del mundo (1598)

So, to summarize: after settling with 25 millions as not to be sued for fraud any longer, the Orange One next returned to his favourite past time, twitter wars, and attacks both the cast of a sold-out-into-the-next decade Broadway musical (for appealing to his designated VP to protect their rights) and Saturday Night Live for daring to make fun of him. Not to be outdone, his chief strategist Steve Bannon informs us that no, he's not a white nationalist, that's total slander. Instead: "I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors."

(I kid you not. He truly said that, to the Hollywood Reporter. I won't link to the article, since it's essentially one long smug "ha, those clueless liberals and their betrayal of the working man" elogy, but you can easily google it.)

The best thing about this: he truly seems to be unaware of the implications of what he's saying here, from casting the Horror Clown as Henry VIII. (the temper certainly fits) to his own bloody demise after a failed plea for his life in grovelling tones ("most gracious prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy!"). Also, clearly he's got his idea of Thomas Cromwell either by pop culture osmosis of Hilary Mantel's books or directly by reading them, which answers my question as to whether readers of her Cromwell saga wouldn't be by necessessity well versed enough in history to know how itall ends. (BTW: Hilary Mantel was appalled by the election of the current most prominent multimarried orange narcissist, and wrote so in that liberal elitist rag denounced by Bannon, the New Yorker.) (Thus answering my next question, as to whom Bannon is casting as Mantel's version of Thomas More, hypocrite and martyr to the old world, to his Thomas Cromwell. Clearly, it's Mantel herself, or at least the New York based papers.)

Of course, it does make one wonder whether a few centuries onwards, a novelist hologame creator will write the saga. He, Bannon, watches as his children fall from the sky, etc. Anyway, as self identifications with historical personages go, this is clearly the winner of the week. Next up: destruction of civil rights monasteries, (re)invention of thought crime.