Happy birthday, Kerry!

Kerry Davison (standing) played by Claire Handley in the 2012 theatre version of Popular. She's with Gareth Russell as Cameron Matthews, Emma Taylor as Imogen Dawson and Lucy Williams as Catherine O'Rourke.

Today is the birthday of the fabulous Kerry Rogan, who was one of the real-life inspirations for Popular's princess of pink, Kerry Davison. In honour of this glorious day, I've decided to post a special sneak-peak preview of Popular's sequel. This is also in prep for some good news and an announcement about the book's title, which will be announced on Facebook very soon!

This scene is from chapter 2 of the sequel and it takes place on the group's holiday to Mexico! It's one of my favourite scenes of Kerry!

***

In a luxurious Mexican resort twenty miles south of San José del Cabo, the great love of Blake Hartman’s life stepped out into the balmy evening air arm-in-arm with Blake’s number one enemy. Standing at exactly six feet in height, trim and tall, with dark hair and blue eyes, Cameron Matthews was dressed in a blue Hugo Boss shirt and white linen trousers. Next to him, with her arm looped through his, Meredith Harper cut a dramatically elegant figure in a Missoni cocktail dress with Mont Blanc diamond studs glistening in her ears and a silver bracelet jangling lightly on her wrist. Her long, gorgeous brunette tresses were swept up for the evening into a cross between a messy bun and a faux bob, with its trail ends bouncing along in perfect synchronicity to the click-clack of her Louboutins as they walked across the marble. She looked like a movie star and an 18^th-century aristocrat rolled into one. Trailing miserably behind them, in a pretty Therapy dress, was Blake’s ex-girlfriend, Catherine O’Rourke, looking like she would rather be anywhere on Earth than attending this dinner on the restaurant veranda in one of the most expensive and exclusive resorts in Mexico.

Weaving their way through the other diners, Cameron, Meredith and Catherine approached a circular table set for five at the far end of the veranda. Already sitting down were two striking blondes – Imogen Dawson and Kerry Davison. Kerry’s perpetually perfect curls dangled around her head and she tossed them back as she picked up her second margarita of the evening. Opposite her, Imogen was busy stubbing out a cigarette and hooting with laughter at whatever point Kerry was making. From the table next to them, Cameron could see two young men out for dinner with their parents, trying to steal covert glances at Imogen when they thought no-one was looking.     

‘Oh,’ she said, as the other three sat down. ‘I didn’t think you’d be able to make it, Catherine.’

‘I’m feeling a bit better,’ Catherine said, with a watery smile.

‘That’s good,’ Imogen replied, without much conviction. ‘Has anyone else had the chicken?’

‘Yes, I had it last night,’ Meredith answered. ‘It was quite nice. Too much cheese though.’

‘I love cheese,’ whispered Kerry, tenderly. ‘Love it.’

‘Cameron, you need to order a drink. It’s catch-up time,’ Imogen ordered.

‘How many have you had?’ Cameron asked.

‘Three,’ said Imogen, raising her margarita glass to him and winking.

‘I’ll go order us some from the bar then,’ he said with a smile.

‘Just order a round of five,’ suggested Imogen, eliciting a panicked grimace from Kerry, who now practically stuck her face into her enormous cocktail glass to try and finish it off before Cameron returned with another.

‘This place is so beau, Meredith. Isn’t it, Kerry?’

Kerry nodded at Imogen’s prompt, but didn’t remove her mouth from the rim of her glass. 

‘Isn’t it?’ sighed Meredith. ‘… Such a good idea.'

‘Our holidays are the best,’ agreed Imogen. ‘Everyone in school was so jealous. Hilarious. We’ll need to go somewhere equally fabulous next year, though. Once you start this kind of thing, you can’t stop.’

‘Paris!’ squealed Kerry, hiccupping slightly at removing herself from the margarita and trying to speak at the same time. ‘J’adore.’

‘Well, we can do Paris for a weekend in Christmas,’ Meredith reasoned. ‘Who on earth would want to go there in the summer?’

‘I would,’ said Kerry. ‘I said, j’adore.’

‘Paris is hideous in the heat, Kerry,’ Meredith replied, condescendingly. ‘That’s why all the actual Parisians leave it in August.’

Kerry regarded Meredith with sizzling dislike for a moment, before catching sight of Cameron picking-up a tray of five cocktails from the bar and hastily returning to her margarita mission. ‘What about Dubai?’ Imogen suggested. ‘Sexy times.’

‘Imogen, you will not be able to shimmy around dressed like Cleopatra,’ groaned Meredith. ‘We’ve been over this. No matter how hard you try to ignore it, the UAE has a dress code these days and you’re the kind of girl who’ll end up in prison because of it.’

‘Jihad would not be fun, would it?’

‘No, Imogen. It wouldn’t.’

‘What’s going on?’ asked Cameron, passing the drinks to his friends, including an especially pleased-looking Kerry, who triumphantly placed her empty glass in the centre of the table.

‘We’re thinking about where to go next year,’ Meredith informed him. ‘Maybe Paris during the Christmas holidays ...’

‘That was my idea,’ smiled Kerry.

‘... but, we’ve no idea about next summer.’

‘What about a cruise?’ asked Cameron.

‘Oh, fun!’ gasped Imogen. ‘I’ve heard they’re literally the most wonderfully tacky things in the history of humanity. We have to do it!’

‘Well, not all of them are,’ said Meredith. ‘It depends where you go and who you go with.’

A pale and panicked Kerry’s fist slammed down on the table. ‘No!’

‘No, what?’ asked Cameron.

‘No cruise,’ she answered. ‘Me no likey boats.’

‘They’re not boats, they’re ships,’ he said pedantically.

‘I don’t care!’ Kerry snapped. ‘If you take me on one of those, I will go into our cabin, curl up in the bed and cry until we see land again.’

‘Why do you hate boats so much?’ Imogen asked, between sips.

‘Have you forgotten what happened to the Titanic?’

‘I don’t really think we’ll be going anywhere near icebergs for our summer holiday,’ Meredith said. ‘And that was a long time ago. Didn’t someone tell me that the Titanic was the last boat to sink because of an iceberg?’

‘Well, it wasn’t!’ hissed Kerry. ‘Whoever told you that was lying. Weren’t they, Cameron?’

‘Maybe they just made a mistake.’

‘They were liars,’ Kerry muttered darkly ‘One sank very recently.’

'Did it actually?’ Meredith asked.

‘Yes,’ Cameron reluctantly admitted. ‘But it was in the Arctic on an iceberg-viewing expedition, so it was basically asking for it, and it took something like seven hours to sink and there were two other boats nearby, so everybody got off in time and everybody lived.’

‘See? You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ breezed Imogen. ‘I vote for cruise.’

‘Nothing to worry about?’ screeched a scandalised Kerry. ‘OK. Fine! These other boats who rescued the people, did they just happen to be in the area?’

‘I think so,’ said Cameron.

‘And why did they pick these people up off the other boat? Out of the goodness of their hearts or because they legally had to? What if our boat hits an iceberg and we’re stuck next to some bastarding heartless captain who doesn’t want any more passengers?’

‘Then I’m pretty sure he’d be tried for homicide or contributory negligence or something,’ shrugged Cameron.

‘They’d send him to Davey Jones’s locker!’ Imogen interjected loudly, having now polished off her fourth margarita.

Ignoring her, Kerry pressed on relentlessly: ‘Right, I understand that this is the first one to hit an iceberg and actually sink since, like, 1912, and I also understand that it took seven hours to sink, but that’s just luck! How long did it take the Titanic to sink?’

‘About two and a half hours, I think,’ said Cameron.

‘Oh my God,’ groaned Imogen. ‘The movie was longer than the actual thing.’

‘I hate that movie,’ interjected Meredith. ‘Stupid, ungrateful heifer.’

‘I know!’ Imogen nodded. ‘You could definitely have fitted two people onto that big bit of wood at the end.’

‘Oh, yeah, that. Plus leaving the fiancé was super unbelievable,’ sighed Meredith.  

‘And how cold was the water where this boat sank in only seven hours, Cameron? As cold as a thousand knives stabbing you all over your body?’

‘Kerry, I don’t know. It was in the Arctic. I assume it was very cold, yes.’

‘And what if there are big bad-assed fishes?’ she said dangerously, digging her nails into his arms.

‘Well, you’d either be in a lifeboat or in a rescue ship,’ Cameron said, trying to pull his flesh away from her talons. ‘I doubt you’d know what fish were near you.’

‘But what if, in my panic, I’m running around on the deck crying so hard that I accidentally run off the side of the ship and there’s a big m’a-fucka’a of an octopus waiting down there for me? Or! What if someone pushes me?’ she said, shooting daggers across the table accusingly at Meredith and Imogen.

‘Why would an octopus be waiting for you?’ asked a baffled Cameron.

‘Because they are the snakes of the sea,’ Kerry whined, ‘and you know how I feel about snakes. If I even see a snake on TV, I can’t breathe and I feel sick. So what happens if I plummet into the Atlantic, land next to an octopus and have a panic attack? I will definitely drown.’

‘OK!’ said Meredith, loudly. ‘Let’s just forget the idea of a cruise.’

A teary-eyed Kerry nodded and returned to her drink, breaking the silence ten seconds later by muttering: ‘Scary, eight-legged m’a-fucka’as.’

Dead Funny

It is hard to describe how much I adored Cleo Spender, the fictional seventy-something A-List socialite and former TV superstar, who is one of the main (and certainly most delightful) characters in Louise Fennell's debut novel, Dead Rich. Impossibly glamorous and equally beautiful, Cleo has decided to grow old deliciously and perhaps my favourite scene in the entire novel was when she is off filming on the slopes of Kathmandu, where "bathed in the golden light of dusk Cleo looked extraordinary, like the sphinx, beautiful and darkly mysterious". 

Dead Rich, published this year by Bedford Square Books and now available through Simon & Schuster, is the story of the Spender family, "glamorous, rich and very, very famous." In Louise Fennell's novel, they're modern Britain's ultimate celebrities, easily dominating the pap-filled, champagne-fuelled world of the tabloids, as well as the older world of London high society. The Spenders are basically like a cross between the Kardashians and the Mitfords and Dead Rich is therefore a warts-and-all expose of what life for today's super-wealthy and super-famous can be. From the loathsomely self-obsessed Valentine Robinson to the aforementioned Cleo, who is relentless in her fabulousness, Dead Rich is packed full of brilliantly improbable yet thoroughly believable characters, from bed-hopping lotharios to bisexual property empire heirs and the spoiled uber-brats of celebrity parents. Clever, naughty, honest, camp and very, very funny, Dead Rich had me laughing out loud and hoping that it'll make the transition to the Silver Screen very soon!

Richard Dawkins and the God Delusion

In the world of celebrities, there is no-one who is more beloved by pseudo-intellectuals and angry men everywhere than Richard Dawkins. For those of you who don't know who he is, Richard Dawkins is vice-president of the British Humanist Society and the former Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. He is also the author of the bestselling book The God Delusion, which has sold over 2 million copies since it was first published in 2006. The book's two central arguments is that religious belief is akin to a mental virus and that religion has been responsible, in one way or the other, for almost all the terrible events in humanity's history. 

Leaving aside the fact that at least half of The God Delusion reads like a rant against a god that Dawkins supposedly doesn't believe in, what riles me about this self-appointed prophet to the unbelieving is that for someone who is so apparently well-educated, quite a lot of what he writes is astonishingly and unforgivably stupid. People have quite rightly pointed out that despite his scientific genius, Professor Dawkins' knowledge of world history is about as sophisticated as GCSE student's and his grasp of theology is even worse. When the bodies of the Russian royal family were discovered in a Siberian forest back in the 1990s, where they had been hidden after their gruesome murder by Communist terrorists in 1918, scientists and observers all over the world quite rightly mocked those members of the Russian Orthodox Church who refused to accept that the skeletons were the remains of the Tsar and his family. Some members of that church believe that the bodies of true saints remain incorrupt - meaning that God proves they are saints by ensuring their bodies don't rot after death. Since Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and their five children had all been declared holy martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1981, many devout Russian monarchists point-blank refused to accept that the mud-stained and bullet-pierced bones discovered in the forest could be the remains of the saint-royals. They persisted in this belief, even though facial reconstruction, pathologists and geneticists all proved beyond any form of doubt that the bodies discovered were related to Grand Duke George (Nicholas II's brother, whose body was removed from its grave in Saint Petersburg) and our own Queen's husband, Prince Philip, who was related to the Romanovs on his mother's side. As one scientist sniped, "I'd like to know how many other relatives of Prince Philip the church think could be buried in that forest!"

By refusing to accept the benefits and methods of science, fundamentalist Christians - of whatever denomination - open themselves up to being queried and mocked. And quite rightly, too, I think. If you believe in a god, you should do so because of the facts, not despite them. Ignoring the facts to help your own argument, or prejudices, is never acceptable in an intellectual environment. Yet, throughout The God Delusion, Dawkins repeatedly ignores historical events that anyone with access to Wikipedia, let alone an Oxford degree, should know about. He claims that no atheist regime has ever instituted religious persecution - ignoring the millions executed by the League of the Militant Godless in the Soviet Union, or under Maoist China, Communist Vietnam, Khmer Rouge Cambodia and even, in its relations with the free Lutheran churches, Nazi Germany. He attributes authorship of various books of the Bible to Saint Paul, when the last time anyone actually thought Saint Paul wrote most of the books at the end of the New Testament was in the early eighteenth century, before the work of the great theologian Dom Augustin Calambret suggested otherwise. He quotes Biblical and Koranic verses out of context; he doesn't seem to know anything, really, about the Reformation, the Crusades or the Inquisition; he misuses the term "Immaculate Conception" (again, Wiki it; it's not what you think, Dawkins) and whilst he rants merrily away on Christianity's (frankly horrific) track record when it comes to homosexuality, he doesn't seem to know that it was only in the sixth and twelfth centuries that the church formally began to codify the idea that homosexuality was wrong and worthy of persecution. If you're going to make such sweeping claims, then the very least you can do is the proper research.

Above all, what I can't stand about Dawkins are his historical-social nuggets of pez-dispensed size quotability and his smug, bile-filled intolerance. He enables every idiot with a passing knowledge of the injustices of our history to point the finger at organised religion and claim it's the fault of a god that doesn't exist and the morons who believe in him. What Dawkins doesn't seem to realise, or at least won't admit, is that human history is a vast, complex tapestries of horrors, mistakes and cruelty, but also kindness, hope and resilience. It's no good trying to blame any one institution and say that's the one that did all the damage. The sad fact of the matter is that it's not religion's "fault" that human history has often been so appalling; it's ours. It's humanity's. There's a great line in the play The Lion in Winter, where the character of Eleanor says, "Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war: not history's force, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten. For the love of God, can't we love one another just a little - that's how peace begins. We have so much to love each other for."

By standing up and declaring that religious faith makes someone intellectually inadequate and even complicit in the many crimes of religion, Dawkins, to me anyway, resembles the worst kind of Christian evangelist. You know the type I mean - the Bible-thumping zealot, devoid of the ability to understand or appreciate any argument but his own, who, by his words, increases the divisions in society, not heals them. Some of the best people I know are atheists, some of the best, and worst, people I know are Christians. Religion has caused racism, sexism, homophobia and misery the world over; it has been responsible for some of the most archaic, barbaric and illogical policies in human history. It has also offered billions hope and comfort in their darkest hours, it has inspired men to great acts of heroism and kindness, it has brought out the best and the worst throughout human history.  There is much, at times, that we should praise about religion and be grateful for. Equally, religion can and should, at times, be criticised, but it deserves a far better treatment by a far better thinker than Richard Dawkins.

New Marie-Antoinette casting

A few months ago, I posted the story that French actress Eva Green had been cast in the big screen adaptation of Chantal Thomas's fantastic novel, Farewell My Queen, the story of the relationship between Queen Marie-Antoinette and one of her servants, Agathe, who has a job as a Reader in the Queen's Household. The novel follows Agathe's worshipful respect for the doomed queen and her experiences living in the Palace of Versailles in the final week before the outbreak of the French Revolution. It's a really incredible novel and very atmospheric, capturing perfectly the terror that seized the palace in July 1789, so I can't wait to see the movie.

However, it turns out that since then, the role of Marie-Antoinette has been re-cast and German actress, Diane Kruger (above), will be playing the queen. Diane looks much more like the real Marie-Antoinette and Marie-Antoinette was Austrian, not French; that being said, both are fantastic actresses.

Agathe is being played by Léa Seydoux; Gérard Depardieu and Virginie Ledoyen will also co-star. Having read the novel, my predictions are that Depardieu will either play Captain de la Roche, the royal zoo keeper, or the King's historiographer; and my money's on Virginie Ledoyen playing Gabrielle, Duchesse de Polignac, the beautiful and controversial Versailles socialite.

Having now posted this online, I will almost certainly be proven wrong.

Either way, can't wait to see Farewell my Queen, which is due out later this year.

"Gone with the Wind" (1939)

"Why does a girl have to be so silly to catch a husband?"

"Gone with the Wind"

Director: Victor Fleming (won the Oscar)

Running Time: 3 hours,  58 minutes

Random Fact: The "hunt for Scarlett O'Hara" was allegedly the most competitive casting race in Hollywood history

Based on the novel Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936)

Cast

Vivien Leigh .... Scarlett O'Hara (won the Oscar)

Clark Gable ..... Captain Rhett Butler (Oscar nominated)

Leslie Howard ..... Ashley Wilkes

Olivia de Havilland .... Melanie Hamilton

Hattie McDaniel .... Mammy (won the Oscar)

Also won the Oscar for: Best Art Direction,  Best Cinematography,  Best Film Editing,  Best Writing , an Honorary Oscar for  its pioneering use of colour, Best Technical Achievement and, of course, Best Picture

Gone with the Wind is justifiably one of, if not the, most famous movie of all time. Based on the 1936 bestseller by Margaret Mitchell, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, Gone with the Wind was an epic achievement, both technologically and artistically in its day. At Oscar season, it predictably swept the board, winning ten Academy Awards. It was not just the longest movie ever made in sound when it first premiered in 1939, running to three hours and forty-four minutes, but it was not only one of the first movies shot in colour. So incredible and so expensive were the techniques used to shoot Gone with the Wind that the Academy created the Oscar for cinematography in its honour and for the next two decades it was remained the most visually stunning examples of technicolor too. It was so commercially successful that as well as being released in 1939 and running in most world cinemas well into 1941, it was re-released in cinemas in America, Europe, South America, Australia and Britain in 1947 (when its message of society adapting in the aftermath of a devastating war was especially relevant), 1954, 1961 (for the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War), 1967, 1971, 1989  (its fiftieth anniversary) and 1998. Adjusted for inflation, it is still the highest grossing domestic movie in American history.

Gone with the Wind tells the story of a spoiled Southern belle, Scarlett O'Hara (played by British actress Vivien Leigh), and her experience of ten years of American history, beginning when she attends a high society barbeque (above) at a neighbour's plantation on the day the American Civil War begins. Manipulative, brazen, deceitful and often spiteful, Scarlett O'Hara is also flirtatious, ruthless and monumentally self-absorbed. Yet, somehow, she is undoubtedly the heroine everyone is cheering for throughout Gone with the Wind's four hour extravaganza. As romance after romance fails and the lavish lifestyle of the Southern upper-classes is swept away when the South loses the Civil War in 1865, Scarlett proves that whilst she is a woman likely to hurl herself onto her bed weeping for days when she doesn't get her own way about what dress to wear to a party, when it comes to the major catastrophes of life, she is definitely the ultimate survivor. Surveying the ruin of her homeland in the aftermath of the Civil War, Scarlett vows that if she has "to lie, steal, cheat or kill" she will overcome the poverty and chaos which has swallowed up the life of wealth and privilege she once enjoyed. She vows she will hold on to the family's plantation at Tara and despite the fact she claims to find them useless and irritating, she fulfils all four of her vows in order to keep her family safe from the invading Yankee armies, famine, defeat, mental illness, political turmoil and crippling taxation.

"Marie Antoinette" (1938)

"Perhaps the great loves come with great tears."

"Marie-Antoinette"

Director: W.S. Van Dyke

Running Time: 2 hours, 29 minutes

Random Fact: The great novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, helped with part of the script

Based on the biography Marie-Antoinette by Stefan Zweig (1933)

Cast

Norma Shearer .... Queen Marie-Antoinette (Oscar nominated)

Robert Morley ..... King Louis the Sixteenth (Oscar nominated)

Tyrone Power ..... Count Axel von Fersen

John Barrymore .... King Louis the Fifteenth

Joseph Schildkraut .... The Duke of Orleans

I thought I'd blog a bit about some of my favourite movies and, still suffering from an OCD about such things thanks to two History degrees, I decided to post them in the order in which the movies were produced, beginning with Marie Antoinette from 1938.

Marie Antoinette covers the life of the Austrian princess who married the future King of France from her arranged marriage at the age of fourteen in 1770 until her execution during the French Revolution, twenty-three years later. One of Hollywood's greatest and highest-paid actresses of the 1930s, Norma Shearer, the so-called "Queen of MGM," signed on to play the title role, in a performance which many (included Norma herself) regarded as the greatest of her career. She narrowly, and controversially, lost out on the Oscar to Bette Davis for her performance in Jezebel.

Despite its age, Marie Antoinette is a beautiful movie to look at and it captures the decadence and glamour of upper class life before the Revolution perfectly. When showing Marie-Antoinette's late teens and early twenties, when she was Europe's ultimate socialite, the movie's costume designer, Adrian, spared no expense and no detail to try and accurately bring to life haute couture from the 1770s.

However, unlike the 2006 version of her life, starring Kirsten Dunst, 1938's Marie Antoinette is not simply a fun and colourful look at the life of the original "girl who has everything." It's also a proper, good old-fashioned historical epic and its final quarter, chronicling Marie-Antoinette's imprisonment during the French Revolution, is tough to watch. The scene in which she and her two children have their last meal with her husband, Louis, before he is taken for his execution on the following morning is incredibly moving, mainly because it is so understated. Norma Shearer's face as she watches her on-screen husband say grace before the meal, knowing that tomorrow he will be dead, is a wonderful example of saying more by doing less in one's acting. A warning though, the following scene, in which the queen's eight year-old son, Louis-Charles, is ripped from her arms to be placed in solitary confinement by their republican jailers is absolutely harrowing to watch. Norma Shearer pulls no punches with her performance and her screams as they try to separate her from her child take a long time to forget. It's made all the worse to watch when you know that it's almost word-for-word historically accurate.

Marie Antoinette is also a great example of how a movie can be historically accurate, without being a documentary. No movie or play or novel based on history will ever be truly accurate; it can't be. Nor should it be. It's supposed to entertain and playwrights and authors are supposed to cut the dull, confusing and messy bits out of life. They have to give life a storyline and so in historical movies, I think it's okay for many details (time line, the number of characters, etc.) to be ditched or fudged (within reason), in order to make the production flow together as a story. However, that doesn't mean you have to change or misrepresent the people you're portraying. I'm of the opinion that they were people, too, and if you're making money out of their life story, the least you can do is to try and get their personalities right. Marie Antoinette certainly does this. Yes, it has been criticised for some for being slightly too harsh on her rival, Madame du Barry, and for portraying her husband, King Louis, as much more simplistic than he actually was. However, in fairness, a lot of that comes from the biography the movie is based on and Louis's dignity and honesty is shown in full detail, particularly in the final half of the movie. And with its leading lady, Marie Antoinette gives by far the most accurate and honest dramatisation of Marie-Antoinette yet seen on screen. As a young woman, she is certainly frivolous, extravagant and "terrified of boredom," but she is also warm-hearted, friendly, honest and kind. Most importantly, Marie Antoinette captures what more modern versions of her life have failed to show - that as she grew up, she possessed a dignity and regal self-assurance that even her enemies commented upon. Given that Norma Shearer manages to convincingly play Marie-Antoinette from a naive but well-intentioned teenager to an heroic but heartbroken widow, it's easy to see why so many people praised the performance.

If you enjoy period dramas or anything from "the Golden Age of Hollywood," try and find a copy of Marie Antoinette. Just be warned: prepare to weep. I watched it one night in our student house in Oxford, because my housemate Beth loves old movies and I thought it would cheer her up after the bad day she had. Unfortunately, when I turned the lights on I found that Beth's mascara had reached her chin and tears were pouring off her face. Turns out, she had been quietly sobbing for the last forty-five minutes. 

"Didn't cheer you up... did it?" I asked, nervously.

"Those filthy, murdering bastards!" she roared, before shaking her head and blowing her nose. "Look what they did to her! I'm a lot angrier with the world than we started watching this. Why did you think that would cheer me up? WHY!"

Like the movie says, all the great stories come with great tears!

An interview with Christopher Gortner, author of "The Tudor Secret"

Early this week, I reviewed Christopher Gortner's novel The Tudor Secret, which you can read here, and I'm delighted to post this interview between Christopher and I discussing his new book and its inspirations. My thanks to the author.

"The Tudor Secret" by Christopher Gortner

“There are moments that define our existence, moments that, if we recognize them, become pivotal turning points in our life. Like pearls on a strand, the accumulation of such moments will in time become the essence of our life, providing solace when our ends draw near. For me, meeting Elizabeth Tudor was one of those moments.” 

I received a review copy of The Tudor Secret on a Friday morning and I had it finished by Saturday evening. I also had a lot to do that weekend, almost none of which got done.

The Tudor Secret is Christopher Gortner’s third novel and like his previous two works, it is set in the sixteenth century. His first, The Last Queen, was set in Spain; his second, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici, in France. This time round, Gortner turns his attention to England in the sweltering summer of 1553 when the teenage King Edward the Sixth has disappeared from public view, amidst rumours that his chief minister, the Duke of Northumberland, is hiding the young king away from the public’s gaze in the hope of clinging onto power for himself. The king’s two sisters – thirty-seven year-old Mary and nineteen year-old Elizabeth – are understandably suspicious, particularly Mary, a devout Roman Catholic who is next in line to inherit the crown if Edward dies without children. Taking it upon herself to discover the truth, Princess Elizabeth journeys to London and it is here, in the sprawling Palace of Whitehall, a palace once built for her executed mother, that she first meets Brendan Prescott, a young equestrian working for the duke of Northumberland, the princesses’ apparent arch-enemy. From this fateful meeting, The Tudor Secret spins a truly addictive adventure story around the mystery of Brendan’s own identity and Elizabeth’s attempts to outwit whatever it is the duke is planning to do.