Monday, 15 February 2010
USA
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
France
South Africa
With Table Mountain providing a spectacular backdrop, Harriet O'Brien soaks up the culture and glamour of South Africa's coastal gem before it gets swamped by football fever
Saturday, 6 February 2010
Review of Queen Emma by The Observer
Helen Castor of the Observer reviewed Queen Emma. An excerpt:
Harriet O'Brien's story is a dramatic one, and her Queen Emma a commanding, shrewd and manipulative figure.... In keeping with such sparing evidence, this is a lean and muscular narrative, often elegantly so. Moments of vivid immediacy are provided by a series of imagined vignettes, one at the beginning of each chapter. The repetition of form risks giving the book a static feel, but some of these tableaux - such as the blinding and murder of Emma's son Alfred - are genuinely powerful.
O'Brien is good at conveying the dangerous complexities of an inconsistently Christianised world where both marriage and legitimacy were negotiable constructs, and where primogeniture was not yet firmly established - circumstances that could make succession within a single dynasty a matter of bloody conflict, even without taking the ambitions of the Viking marauders into account. She gives a potent reminder of how pivotal a role women could play even in such an ostensibly macho society - and, despite the Victorian teleology of Our Island Story, of how contingent an entity England really is.
Friday, 5 February 2010
Review of Queen Emma in The Independent
Christina Hardyment reviewed Queen Emma in The Independent. An excerpt
Emma is not one of our best known queens but she richly deserves this illuminating biography. She married two English kings (Aethelred the Unready and Cnut), saw two of her sons (Harthacnut and Edward the Confessor) ... win the English throne, made several comebacks from disgrace and emerged as the only pre-Norman Conquest royal to have her bloodline continue after 1066.
Explaining how she achieved all this is no easy task, given the paucity and unreliability of contemporary records, the genealogical complexities of marriages and concubinages between Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Danes and Norwegians, and the constant ebb and flow of Norse invaders into England, punctuated by truce-making, truce-breaking and vengeful massacres. But Harriet O'Brien succeeds both in mapping the muddled decades between 1000 and 1066, and in constructing a plausible picture of Emma - or Aelfgifu, as her English subjects preferred to call her.
... O'Brien conveys the striking contemporary contrasts between extreme brutality and intense religiosity: lewd riddles and the noble nudity of Lady Godgifu (Godiva to you), stargazing and saint worship.
