No comments about Christchurch: A Pictorial History (Pictorial history series).

No comments about Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century Part II (Early English Text Society Supplementary Series) (Pt. 2).

No comments about Genealogy of the Baily Family of Bromham, Wiltshire, England: And More Particularly of the Descendants of Joel Baily, Who Came from Bromham About 1682 and Settled in Chester County, Pa.

No comments about The Iron Bridge: Symbol of the Industrial Revolution (None).

1 comments about English Local History: An Introduction (History Handbooks).

1. Dr. Tiller is a central figure in the renaissance of English local history studies that has taken place over the last 20 years. In this book, her unapologetic promotion of the "new" local history is strong. This "new" history usually concentrates on thematic studies of communities, and tracks individual lives within those communities. This tends to de-emphasize, for example, landscape studies, or those eras, so important for many of the places that we study, where tracking individuals is often impossible (e.g. Anglo-saxon or earlier periods). Whilst probably not "local history" in the true sense, Dr. Tiller seems to have little regard for the genealogists or those merely seeking nostalgia. We should remember that it is these motives, within the general public, that are the engines which drive the politicians to support the county record offices, which in turn, facilitate the serious studies that Dr. Tiller proposes. Unexpectedly, this book is in fact a good general introduction to the local history of England, as well as being a sophisticated "how to" volume. This is distinctive, therefore, amongst the fairly large bibliography on researching english local history that now exists. An interesting foil is provided by the recent book by Michael A. Williams, "Researching Local History", which is one man's journey around some of the later aspects of the subject. Professor Williams's is also a sophisticated "how to" volume but lacks Dr. Tiller's comprehensiveness. If you want a single volume as a general introduction to the local history of England, then buy Tiller. As a bonus, you will also get a good guide to research techniques, that is probably about as good as any other that is available on this subject.

2 comments about Thames: Sacred River.

1. Chapeau! Kudos! Peter Ackroyd has done a terrific job with this book. From his early novel _Hawksmoor_, Ackroyd has evolved into the chronicler par excellence of London, both through his book of the same name and by the flavour of London life in his biographies of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Sir Thomas More, Dickens, Blake, and other works (both fictional and non).
   
   This cornucopia has history, geography, geology, spirituality, sociology, literary and cultural referencing, psychology, life cycles, transport, trade, ecology, hedonism, commercialism. It's a staggeringly accomplished chronicle and a worthy tribute to the liquid heart of London.
   
   Ackroyd ranges masterfully from facts and statistics - some of them fascinating - through to dreams and legends. Although London dominates, this deals with the villages and towns along the Thames - e.g., Windsor as represented by the poet Alexander Pope. The historical thread moves from the prehistoric river, and the Thames Caesar conquered, through to the modern flood protection afforded by the Thames Barrier. Notwithstanding its erudition, the flow is ceaseless and the touch light, so that it's an easy, satisfying read.
   
   Thankfully, Ackroyd controls his trademark fascination in filth and murk aspects, balancing them judiciously with the elevated, refined and spiritual. He delightedly describes the Fleet as "merd-urinous", "wholly rank" and "the excremental centre of London's polluted life". This is tempered by the view "at twilight, a soft grey, a lacustrine light."
   
   With its buried coins and weapons, syringes, severed heads, the river is a "depository of past lives" but Ackroyd gives us a final vision of "estuarial river" rushing to the "sea's embrace."
   
   I can do no better than let the chapters speak for themselves:
   
   1. "The Mirror of history": river as fact (statistics) and metaphor - the "museum of Englishness", symbolizing the national character. Time of the river: Hydrologic and geologic.
   2. Father Thames - river deities, Thames Basin, birth/source aspects
   3. Issuing Forth: tributaries, especially the Fleet.
   4. Beginnings: Ice Ages, barrows, and henges; Caesar and Vikings.
   5. The sacred river - saints and ruins: includes Norman palaces, Westminster Abbey, monasteries(work and education), plague and fire.
   6.Elemental and Equal: riverine cycle/essence and social upheavals/revolutions.
   7. The working river -: River boats, London Bridge and subways, river law and conservation; the criminal element (theft, witches); watermen, porters, weir keepers.
   8. River of trade - wharves, mills, breweries, docks, modern decline - new financial districts e.g. Canary Wharf and Docklands.
   9. The Natural River: fog, wind, rain, the Thames Barrier (flood protection). Sacred woods and trees, villages, swans and whales (!)
   10. A stream of pleasure - pubs, sports, carnivals, Lord Mayor's pageant, physic gardens Contrasts with mortality, sewers, and typhus in the 18th-19th centuries.
   11. The healing spring - wells, hospitals, flowers. A rhapsodic chapter....
   12. The river of art - Turner, Conrad, Jerome - chroniclers (the 16th-century antiquarian John Leland), novelists (Dickens, Grahame), poets Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Shelley, Arnold.
   13. Shadows and depth - Visions of Carroll and Traherne. Local history; dreams and legends.
   14. The river of death - riverine findings (coins, weapons, syringes, severed heads). Mythology. Suicides, murders, drownings.
   15. The river's end - the estuarial river which "rushes to the sea's embrace."
   
   A grand achievement. Prepare to be delighted, amazed - and moved.



2. I have just spent an enjoyable couple of weeks meandering through this book acquiring all manner of new knowledge.
   
   While this book is a treat for the prose alone, the knowledge presented had me wanting to rush in many different directions to explore new possibilities. The story of the Thames is as much a part of British history as any conventional reportage of people and events.
   
   The book would have benefitted from some tighter editing. As written, the text seems to suggest that Claudius was in Britain only a decade or so after Julius Caesar instead of almost 90 years later. While in the lifetime of the river itself this time difference is almost infinitesimal, it jars and is unnecessary.
   
   I found myself drifting in the book: fascinated by the facts, interested by the speculation and intrigued by the possibilities. 'Water is utterly mysterious'
   
   'Thames' contains a bibliography which provides a starting point for further exploration.
   
   Highly recommended, but not necessarily as an authoritative source of historical dates.
   
   Jennifer Cameron-Smith

2 comments about These Ruins are Inhabited.

1. Having first seen this book poking out of someone's shopping bag whilst in hospital, I was intrigued by its title.

   It's essentially a work based on the common realisation that nothing is exactly as it would first seem. If you can't judge a book by its cover, then you certainly shouldn't judge Muriel Beadle by her work.

   She is a writer from the traditional school of modern ethical query, which creates a dichotomy between the existential relationship of the 'id' and the more problematic 'ego'.

   All in all, a rollicking good read.




2. The late Muriel Beadle (d. 1994) was, among other things, the wife of the pioneering geneticist George Wells Beadle (1903-1989). The time they spent in Oxford while he was the George Eastman Visiting Professor from CalTech (the California Institute of Technology) is the subject of this enchanting little book from 1961. I first read it in High School (longer ago than I like to think). I missed this reprinting, and it seems out of print (again) over here. But I have heard directly from English academics how much they enjoyed the book, and Amazon UK is currently offering a British edition; so it has found a home somewhere.
   
   Muriel Beadle was an acute observer, and her intelligence is obvious. Some of her professed bewilderment at English society seems a bit exaggerated for the sake of the reader. But her points of reference are the Midwest of her childhood, and, later, California suburbia as a faculty wife. Post-War Britain (actually, late 1950s, but still adjusting) offered a very uneasy mix of official egalitarianism and intense class-consciousness, with no clear parallels in her personal experience.
   
   In one set of vignettes, she finds her generalized American accent mistaken for (a) working class and (b) "posh" and affected, with strong reactions to either assumption. Her difficulty in understanding either working-class or upper-class English likewise ignites suspicion. Her husband's matter-of-fact observation that there were *some* failings in the existing British educational system compared to a comprehensive American High School is assumed to be an endorsement of a new government policy. (His listeners understood it as "Comprehensive School" ... .)
   
   She has her own comments comparing elementary school systems -- 1940s and 1950s-vintage, and no longer really valid on either end, but very interesting -- and attitudes toward preventive medicine (she seems obsessive to the English, they seem lax to her).
   
   She finds figuring out colloquial weights and measures (quick, define "stone" in relation to a quantity of coal) is an unexpected challenge. Her husband and son are surprised that, although she understands the astronomy perfectly well, in the abstract, she hasn't automatically associated latitude with the length of the day. (I've been around enough CalTech people to recognize the not-quite-flattering assumption that you are as brilliant and well-informed as they are, and *should* think as clearly. And these days, the spelling seems to be Caltech, especially on-line; I guess I'm already a fossil.)
   
   Then, as she is beginning to feel at home, her husband learns he is co-winner of a Nobel Prize (Physiology and Medicine), and everything shifts into high gear. More cultural / geographical disconnects, some seen from the other side, as they visit the continent. "Is there much snow in America, Mrs. Beadle?" --- quick mental comparison of her childhood winters to recent years in Pasadena (home of the New Year's Day Rose Parade) -- "About as much as in Europe." I've never been able to think of a better short answer to that question.
   
   "These Ruins are Inhabited" has a sequel, two or three times the length: "Where Has All the Ivy Gone?: A Memoir of University Life," describing her husband's tenure (1961-1968) as President of the University of Chicago (Doubleday, 1972; reissued by the University of Chicago Press, "With a New Epilogue," under the Midway imprint in 1978). The tone there is sometimes graver; being in a policy-making position imposed burdens on her husband, which she shared. Tensions along racial and ethnic divides were now as open as any class-based hostility, and completely beyond a University's control; but the Administration could take the blame from all sides.
   
   But there is a scene in which the newly-arrived President of the University breaks out his mountaineering gear to go to the rescue of a kitten on a roof, attracting police attention ... .

No comments about Peirce genealogy,: Being the record of the posterity of John Pers, an early inhabitant of Watertown, in New England ... with notes on the history of other families of Peirce, Pierce, Pearce, etc.

No comments about Crewe: Railway Town, Company and People 1840-1914.

5 comments about Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography (Women in History).

1. This was a wonderful book. I would read as much as I had time to each day and then spend time thinking about Eleanor until I could get back to her story. I have read other accounts, one historical, of Eleanor of Aquitaine, but this one brings her to life more than anything else I have read about her. She truly was a remarkable person by any standards and Meade made me feel as though I was right there watching it all unfold. I would highly recommend this book, particularly, if you have not read anything else on Eleanor and I guarantee you will want to find out more.



2. This book provides a detailed, insightful and thorough examination of a woman whose life would have been radical by modern standards. However, Eleanor lived nine centuries ago, in an age when patriarchial attitudes, values and mores were completely dominant. In such a world, Eleanor not only survived, she thrieved. The wife of two powerful Kings, Eleanor was a match for any man. She floutted convention, wearing armour and riding a charger on crusade, Eleanor remained sexually attractive enough to have the King of England, a man fourteen years her junior, marry her without regard for her lack of the normal virginal requirements of a queen consort.



3. "Meade's history [of Eleanor] is full of color, but based on facts," a reviewer wrote in 1999. As indeed it should be. Those qualities are not antithetical: history is often colorful and always based on facts. Reading reviews of Marion Meade's "Eleanor of Aquitaine: a Biography" (1977) is to discover that this writer is defending Meade's book against comments such as: "[It's] a very good read, but one suspects it is a poor history." And, under the heading "Entertaining fiction, not history" a reviewer describes Meade's book as, "indeed entertaining, and paints a vivid portrait... one that many readers have complained is missing from other biographies of this most fascinating queen." But then the reviewer changes direction, adding: "A substantial proportion of that portrait is conjecture."
   
   Some conjecture is essential to a quality biography from a faraway time. (Where would a jury be without connecting facts?) Meade's book is readable, superbly researched--as one expects from an accomplished journalist--and colorful. It is what a lengthy biography of an amazing woman should be, especially when the adventure of that long, exceptional life was so extraordinary.
   
   Marion Meade's diversity of interests is intriguing. She has written biographies of Buster Keaton, Woody Allen, Dorothy Parker, and tales of the roaring twenties under the title "Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin." On the other hand, here is this well-researched, compelling biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, a rebellious life, to be sure, but a life pushing forth from the stony soil of the straightened, misogynistic twelfth century. Eleanor's life and times clearly made an impact on the author. Two years later (no doubt using some of the same hard-won research) she gave us the tale of Eleanor's near-contempory in "Stealing Heaven: The Love Story of Heloise and Abelard." Eleanor may have heard Abelard preach in Paris. Like Heloise, in Meade's capable hands Eleanor of Aquitaine comes across as the mistress of her life--even, be it said, of her life's many frustrations.
   
   Robert Fripp, author of
   "Power of a Woman. Memoirs of a turbulent life: Eleanor of Aquitaine"



4. I am not much of a reader of biographies as many of them read like text books. Meade has managed to do a superlative job in creating a biography that I found myself unable to put down.
   
   I have read the critics stating the book is more fiction than history. Without personally researching every document Meade used to develop her book (a task I am sure the critics did not perform), I felt able to easily understand where Meade made conjectures about Eleanor's thoughts and motivations for the actions that she took, most of which were well documented by Eleanor's contemporaries - particularly in the accounting department. It is apparent to me that Meade's conjectures were based on these solid facts along with a good dose of understanding what it much have been like for a women of means and will to be constantly under the thumb of men.
   
   Critics also state that Meade painted a woman without faults. Obviously they did not read the book. The description Meade gives of Eleanor's second attempt to regain Toulouse with her land hungry second husband shortly after a friendly truce with her ex-husband was gained, amounted to Meade basically stating in so many words, "What was she thinking?"
   
   Rather than faultless, Meade gives a detailed description of a complex woman; a woman of intelligence, but also a woman easily succumbed to flattery; a woman of independent will consistently struggling against a society clipping her wings.



5. I've had this book for several years now, reading it after someone recommended it to me. Eleanor had such an interesting life that every now and then I pull out this book and read it again. All the other reviews give great details reviewing her life so I won't review the content again. Most others have completed better descriptions than I could give. She is a fascinating character and the things she experienced were unbelievable and and amazing. I highly recommend this book for history lovers.