Jonathan Healey
@jonathanhealey
Historian and Occasional Book-writer ( Works at Oxford University. New book, The Blood in Winter, out now!
Nice autograph there on a Jacobean Star Chamber document, if you’re a fan of celebrity 1640s royalists.
I'm pretty cynical about this kind of managerial horseshit at the best of times, but the fact they have a typo *in the first sentence* is just perfect.
The fact this book was published in Lancaster makes the title even funnier….
Kicking off in Nottingham on 22 August. Now where have I heard that before?
I sort of agree about the word ‘trade’ and always try to avoid it, but Hilary Mantel’s jibe about book sales was silly. It ought to be possible to disagree about how we interpret the past without making it a pissing contest about market share.
Arguably one sign of the decline of historical literacy in the world today is that people are driven to view scholarly debate as ‘truth vs propaganda’.
Was just reading about a public religious conference between soldiers in the New Model Army and clergymen at the University of Oxford, held in 1646, and... I'm not sure Proquest has quite nailed this one.
Feels like one of these three religious opinions is a bit different to the others:
I now feel better about the time someone complained to my boss about me doing an online meeting (during lockdown) from my bed.
If you want a chuckle, check out this rant from a hotelier whose chalet I stayed in over the Easter hols. It had dodgy electrics, leaking plumbing and, er, no fire alarms. I wasn't pleased and reviewed it here on Google. www.google.com.jm/travel/hotel...
Thomas Fairfax on 3 June 1645, promising that his army would never treat women as cruelly as the royalists had done at Leicester. A grim irony given what would happen a few days later at Naseby.
Letter from Prince Rupert ordering the razing of Chilton House, then, the next day: ‘You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’
Fascinating letter from Charles I in 1644, ordering the church and village of Boarstall to be pulled down for military reasons.
Been skiing for three days, which is enough to learn that this is a lie.
Loved this from the Bodleian John le Carre exhibition. Alec Guinness writing to the author, worrying about playing George Smiley because ‘although thick-set I am not really rotund and double-chinned’.
Early modernists! Anyone seen the word 'gossip' applied to a man before? Got a will here that appoints 'my good and loving gossip Mr Henry Ireton' (yes, that Henry Ireton) as overseer. Dates to 1648.
Just got this letter from the local estate agent, who’ve played an absolute blinder there…
‘We are but newly delivered from rebellion, and we know that that rebellion first begun under the pretence of religion and the law’. A royalist perspective on the causes of the Civil War, from the 1660s, from LCJKB Keeling.