Charlie Fenton > Recent Status Updates

‘The coming of the English Civil War constituted a monstrous upheaval for civilians and soldiers alike, famously turning brother against brother, friend against friend. Many people died. One estimate has it that 190,000 people perished directly or indirectly as a result of the war in England, with a further 60,000 dying in Scotland.’

‘An adult might reach the age of 60 and consider it a fortunate stroke of luck, but most people living in the 1600s could expect a lifespan of somewhere between 30 and 40 years. To the modern observer living in England in the twenty-first century, this is a startlingly young age, tantamount to dying in the prime of life.’

Audiobook version, not on here.

‘A twelve-year-old was lynched for failing to recite his Ave Maria. When the boy was proved to be Catholic after all, the mob turned on Protestant shop keepers in Daurade and accused them of provoking the killing. Two Jewish servants in the medieval heart of the city were attacked and their beards ripped out with blacksmiths’ tongs.’

‘Henry had a resident ambassador in Paris, this being Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester. It might have been expected that he would take the main responsibility for obstructing Pole’s mission, but his conduct during the legate’s brief stay in France was hesitant, not to say contradictory to his king’s intentions, which were that Pole should be arrested as a traitor.’

‘Piet had little faith the truce would hold. Both the Catholic and the Protestant leaders were aggrieved, believing too much had been conceded to the other side, with two few assurances given to them in return. The city was swamped with weapons and aggression. He did not think either faction would disarm, whatever the terms of the truce. Toulouse was on borrowed time.’

‘After the Dissolution, Rochester was lucky to retain cathedral status, but the monastery disappeared and the monks dispersed. The buildings and the monks dispersed. The buildings were plundered for stone. The precinct is dotted with their ghostly remains, poking up in lawns, as outhouses or formal gardens.’

‘Peterborough lacks great monuments, but two Tudor queens are remembered in the sanctuary. One is the aforementioned Catherine of Aragon, granted dignity at last in death. She is the beneficiary still of an annual service of remembrance in the cathedral. Nearby is a memorial to another sad queen, Mary Queen of Scots. Her body rested here on its way from execution at Fotheringhay in 1587 to Westminster Abbey’

‘Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral loves superlatives. It is the biggest church in England. It has the world’s tallest tower and the longest footprint after St Peter’s in Rome. Only Seville cathedral outranks it in gothic volume. Begun in 1902 and not finished until 1978, this great building is medieval in appearance, gestation and extravagance.’

‘On the plains below lay Toulouse. Glorious, magnificent, glinting like a jewel in the dawn haze. She saw a wide, wide river, in front of the southern section of the city walls, like a gown of spun silver. Behind it, a myriad steeples and domes and spires, each touched by the rising sun so it seemed as if the whole city was aflame. La ville rose, Piet had called it.’

‘No cloister in England stands comparison with Gloucester, standard-bearer for the new Perpendicular. On a warm summer evening, the sun, filtered by coloured glass, floods its arcades. The roof is the first example in England of the half-cone vault, dating from the 1350s.’

“Monasteries sacked in the south, priests attacked at prayer, these outrages committed by Huguenots are well documented. None of this is a question of faith, it is barbarism.”

‘Canterbury is the most visited English cathedral and therefore can be the most crowded. Yet its vastness can embrace all-comers. Just as its history straddled the Middle Ages from Conquest to Reformation, so its architecture covers the spectrum from Norman to Perpendicular. Canterbury is the story of the English cathedral, complete unto itself.’

“This Edict,” Crompton countered, “like all those that have been issued before, is a thing of smoke and mirrors. It is intended to give the illusion of compromise between the demands of the Catholics - by which I mean the Duke of Guise and his allies - and the moderate Catholics within the court. The Guise faction has no intention of honouring it, none whatsoever.”

‘In England he worked for a range of clients of different social means, but even in those paintings made for sitters with fewer financial resources, the compromise was not on artistic quality, but on the material aspects of value: size of panel (that is, degree of effort) and materials (amount and expense of pigments).’

‘in the Overlook all times were one. There was an endless night in August of 1945, with laughter and drinks and a chosen shining few going up and coming down in the elevator, drinking champagne and popping party favors in each other’s faces. It was a not-yet-light morning in June some twenty years later and the organization hitters endlessly pumped shotgun shells into the torn and bleeding bodies of three men’

‘By 1535 or 1536 at the latest, Henry appointed Holbein as one of his court painters, although the exact date cannot be pinpointed because of missing records. As Holbein had been hoping for, the appointment gave him a reliable income as well as an acknowledged status, and he spent most of the last part of his life in a very different context from that of Basel, mostly producing portraits (and some other works)’

‘A draw, however, was not a win. And the one thing in her life that she was sure she loved was a win. She looked at Borgov’s face again and saw with mild surprise that he was tired. She shook her head. No.’

‘Sometimes, her head reeling, she would feel in the depth of her stomach an anger as intense as the pain of a burst abcess in the jaw - a toothache so potent that nothing but drink could alleviate it. Sometimes the drink had to be forced against a rejection of it by her body, but she did it. She would get it down and wait and the feelings would subside a bit. It was like turning down the volume.’

‘While a significant proportion of Holbein the Younger’s earliest works are religious in character and fulfil many of the same roles as the paintings made by his father, the swift advance of Protestantism in Basel during the 1520s disrupted that form of artistic patronage. Those who became Protestant, particularly those who were more extreme than Luther, tended to reject religious images altogether’

‘Religious imagery was absolutely central to the career of Holbein’s father, Hans Holbein the Elder: although he did paint some portraits and other secular images, the great majority of his work consisted of altarpieces, devotional panels and other forms of religious imagery like epitaphs and votive paintings. That changed dramatically in the career of his son.’

‘No documentation confirms the elder Holbein’s training of his sons, but technically and conceptually their earliest work shows close affiliation with his. Moreover, it seems natural to infer from the two sets of early portraits the father’s pride in (and affection for) his sons.’

‘will tackle head-on the ways in which we interpret Holbein’s surviving work, both as material products of physical making, and as signs of authorial intent that we use to construct a historical persona. The goal is not to discard the aim of better understanding Holbein and his art, but to recognize the inevitable distance between whatever understanding we can arrive at today given the limited information’

‘“But it’s mostly about my being a girl."
"Well, you are one."
"It shouldn’t be that important," Beth said. "They didn’t print half the things I told them. They didn’t tell about Mr. Shaibel. They didn’t say anything about how I play the Sicilian."
"But, Beth," Mrs. Wheatley said, "it makes you a celebrity!"
Beth looked at her thoughtfully, "For being a girl, mostly," she said.’

‘It made her sad in a way when she eventually saw how to beat him. It was after the nineteenth move, and she felt herself resisting it as it opened up in her mind, hating to let go of the pleasant ballet they had danced together. But there it was: four moves and he would have to lose a rook or worse.’

‘The strength of official feeling against the mission was made very clear the following month when a royal proclamation was issued from Richmond, lambasting all Jesuits and seminarians as ‘seedmen of treason’. These ‘fugitives, rebels and traitors’, it pronounced, had trained abroad ‘in school points of sedition’ and returned ‘by stealth’ to incite rebellion.’

‘Elizabeth I disliked the Bond. She would never have survived her sister’s reign had such a provision existed and, quite apart from the dubious ethics of slaying a potential innocent, she baulked (as she had in 1563) at Burghley’s additional efforts to force through radical constitutional measures that would have interfered with her right to determine the succession.’

‘Somehow she sensed that what she had been caught doing was or a magnitude beyond usual punishment. And, deeper than that, she was aware of the complicity of the orphanage that had fed her and all the others on pills that would make them less restless, easier to deal with.’

‘It should not be forgotten that Campion the saint (canonised in 1970), or Campion the traitor, was also Campion the scholar, poet, philosopher, historian, dramatist and, for the Vaux children, the schoolmaster. He was a capable as any man of human frailty and as susceptible as any prisoner to torture.’

‘His son should be with him now. He was disappointed in Edward. He was showing himself to be unworthy of the crown. He had thought of this ever since he had held his young son Thomas in his arms. But a baby. It was years before he would grow to manhood. And in the meantime there was Edward. Edward had no desire to learn to be a king; he preferred to frivol away his time with companions like himself.’