This is a beautiful and loving memoir. Using mostly her own diary entries, Antonia Fraser recounts her relationship with Harold Pinter. At first the minimal nature of the narration explaining the people and events frustrated me (there are a lot of first names sprinkled about, some of them turni...
When one gets sick, it's always assumed that it's the perfect time to thin one's personal to-read pile. In some ways it is: after all, it's not as if one can get up and go to work, or have life in general cut into one's reading time when one is supposed to be lying down and recovering. Unfortunat...
My copy of Lady Antonia Fraser's "Marie-Antoinette, The Journey" (Anchor Books, 2002) sports on its cover the round face of Kirsten Dunst which, as anyone who has studied portraits of Marie-Antoinette knows, is in sharp contrast to the lovely oval countenance of the real queen. I found it annoyin...
Tada! After a foolishly long time and a couple of breaks I have finished this book. It didn't take me forever to read because it was boring (it was pretty interesting), it was just a little like wading through treacle though.It was an interesting period, covering before, during and after Cromwell...
When it comes to history about people who didn't necessarily write down their stories or legends, it can be very difficult separating myth from fact. But thanks to the diligence of modern historians and accidental discoveries brought about by excavation (or simply someone diving or fishing in th...
My second time to read an Antonia Fraser (born 1932) book. My first by her was a biography, Marie Antoinette: The Journey (4 stars). Lady Antonia Fraser is the widow of Harold Pinter (1930-2008), the 2005 Nobel for Literature winner. Although I liked this book, I thought that Lady Fraser was a be...
Everything you ever wanted or needed to know about Charles II of England, complete with pictures. Very interesting tome along with much detail about the King who ruled England from 1660-1685. Mary Queen of Scots great grandson was an avid sportsmen, gardener and scientist..this King is a fascin...
" 'We don't want to hurt her. We must remember that. All of us. She is after all innocent ... Well, isn't she?'"With these words the leader of the secret group tries to establish the ground rules of its conspiracy concerning the bride, HRH Princess Amy of Cumberland, a 22-year-old British Prin...
Barely average as a murder mystery. Antonia Fraser might be a decent biographer, but she's clearly better at analysing historical characters and events than creating her own. Oxford Blood takes place, rather obviously, at an Oxford college, where there's mystery about the true parentage of an ari...
Structurally this was much better than the first two; Fraser has found her ground in the genre, here, writing an actual mystery in which her detective investigates, set in a London social milieu that she can write both comfortably and believably. It had a taste of the guilty pleasure, her combin...
For much of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I the repression meted out against Catholics increased almost annually. You can understand why the Queen might have been a bit annoyed with the Catholics – she might well have won the Spanish Armada, but even the joy of winning would have to have been tem...
This is not a mystery, really. Yes, there is a death, and it is mysterious, but it is really more of a take on a 1960s gothic -- a woman who is an outsider goes to the strange, empty house and is surrounded by family tensions she does not understand and menaced by forces which she is only vaguel...