u/Watchhistory

Robert Penn Warren's All The Kings Men is as much a description of the US, as Tolstoy's War and Peace was of Russia in the time that novel takes place. Warren's novel describes the US's peculiar sense it can ignore reality, that all of us are entitled to be rich and famous, even those who do nothing but play video games and complain. If we aren't among those who can treat everyone else as we feel at any time without any legal or human repercussions, we have been cheated out of it by 'Others.' Thus the repeated rise of vicious populist racism, misogyny, anti-education and isolationism in this, our dear United States of America.

In Willie Stark, born to generational deprivation begins his quest to rise to power by studying history. In the meantime, Jack Burden, his born to generational privilege chronicler “read American history, not for school, not because I had to, but because I had, by accident, stepped through the thin, crackly crust of the present, and felt the first pull of the quicksand about my ankles.”

For Jack Burden, world history, national history, his personal history is not the immiserated charnel house imposed upon most people throughout history by the entitled, rich and powerful. For Burden, these tales are "the enchantments of the past."

For this privileged fellow, history is a magical wonder, into which he can escape from reality.

For him history is the same as reading fantasy, or playing a video game. That's Burden's tragedy.

Stark begins with the best of ideals and passions, to improve his life so that he can improve the lives of the others who are like him, born without the privileges of generations of education, outside the long established networks of power and dominance. He begins well, ends corrupt and ignoring the realities of the people around him, because he no longer needs to. That is his tragic ending.

The novel takes place in the 1920's and 1930's. Many of the acclaimed novels from that time here in the US fell out of favor in the last 50 - 60 years, it seems, with few readers and less attention, partly because they are too 'realist' in treatment of character and event than concentrated upon style and form.  But these days it feels important to revisit these works, such as Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry, or Edna Ferber's Saratoga Trunk.

This anthology provides a great deal of information about these matters, as treated in fiction and non-fiction --

Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940
Edited by Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz.  Foreword by Toni Morrison.

Located firmly within the Regency and Napoleonic era in which Lord Devlin, Sebastian St. Cyr, and his beloved wife, the Lady Hero Devlin operate, we have arrived to 1816. The sins of the further past, in this case the North American War of Independence, collide with the atrocities of the more recent past, the Peninsular War, and with the perpetual sins committed by the wealthy and powerful even on the citizens of their own country.

All this is made part of the plot, and clear without in the least harming the narrative energey that pulls the reader along, as good as any of the best preceding installments in the series, perhaps even better done than some of them. We really want to know who did it, and why.

And yes, despite campaign victories, the world is an even darker place now for the majority of English than it was before.

https://preview.redd.it/65iymvqvuj0h1.png?width=310&format=png&auto=webp&s=4f2840e365bf13d436a02c2bd6aff88f3f820a37

>... There is frantic >!halfway-up-the-stairs sex. There is shouting-into-a-full-length-mirror sex. And there is a soft-focus barnyard tryst during which Rupert buries his saturnine slab of a face between Cameron’s knockers and proceeds to bellow “NYAAAAARRR” while she thwacks his thighs with a riding crop. It’s quite something.!<

>>!Buried somewhere within this thrashing forest of limbs is a plot. This, too, is ridiculous. We join the shaggers as they prepare for the 1987 general election. Will Rupert retain his seat or will Tony and monstrous tabloid hack Beattie (Annabel Scholey) conspire to stitch him up like a kipper? And who will prove victorious in the ongoing struggle to secure the coveted Central South West television franchise, eh? Who? WHO!<? ....

I have finally received a detailed account of the debacle that was Lancaster's military campaign to invade Castile in his quest to sit on the throne of Castile himself -- having been styling himself as King of Castile for a while now, back in England, evidently with the consent and support of his nephew, King Richard.

This is due to Helen Carr's The Red Prince: The Life of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster (2021).

This episode of history has frustratingly eluded me finding any lengthy account (this is on me, for I didn't put real effort into research, as other, actual professional projects were always to the fore) of how it failed so maximally.

Though this is a full life biography, while remaining within only 247 pp. (before source, reference, citation and index pp.), it does provide a gratifyingly full work-up of the preliminaries to manning and funding and transport, who the Duke is opposing himself to, how it all goes wrong (inevitably, it seems).

Yet!

1. He emerges from the catastrophe vastly richer than his already vastly rich self from before the campaign. Though, ahem, at the cost of the lives of about half his men, including some of his oldest and most staunch friends and supporters.

2. Unlike so many, he seems to have learned from this catastrophic, deadly destruction, having learned something, allowing himself to be less arrogant, while also continuing to hold the throne of England together for his nephew. That came back so frackin' frackin' richer than before may have had something to do with it. The king, his nephew, also gifted him with even more lands and revenues. And even London dropped its passionate antagonism against him.

Failing/falling upward? Though he already was 2nd to none but the king in England.

What I found so useful and gratifying in this biography is its focus on the Duke as a political actor in his life, rather than spinning it toward the romance with his mistress, Katherine Swynford, and relationship with her brother-in-law, the poet, Chaucer. This is not to say I don't find these of interest and importance, on the contrary. But this is what it seems so many focus on. Seeing the Duke's actual operations in England on behalf of his nephew the king is impressive. He really was loyal at all times. Which cannot be said for many family members of England's royalty throughout history.