The weakness of Tsar Nicholas II

Ask any schoolchild or anyone with a passing knowledge of history to come up with one adjective they associate with Russia's last emperor and the majority of them will produce the word "weak." Nicholas II's weakness is as enduring an image in history as Cleopatra's sex appeal, Marie-Antoinette's frivolity and Winston Churchill's bullish patriotism. The idea that Nicholas was a weak-willed idiot was current in his own lifetime and eagerly encouraged by his enemies - particularly Leon Trotsky, the darling of the Bolshevik Left after they excused him for his complicity in the genocide of 1918 - 1921 in order to loudly proclaim that there would have been no genocide in the 1930s, had he, rather than Stalin, taken control of the Soviet Union after 1924. It was Trotsky who memorably proclaimed that Nicholas II had not had the intellectual capabilities necessary to run a village post office, let alone an empire. Anecdotes - like diary entries revealing that he played dominoes on the eve of the February Revolution or burst into tears in front of his cousin Sandro at the thought of inheriting the throne - are endlessly trotted out to prove that this was not only a man who couldn't rule, but who didn't want to, either. Louis XVI, the king whose rule ended in the French Revolution, is supposed to have made a similarly uninspiring start to his reign, when he and his wife Marie-Antoinette fell to their knees in prayer and asked God to guide them, because they were too young and inexperienced to reign. At the time, everyone saw the couple's actions as pious and humble; it was only once both of them perished on the steps of the guillotine that hindsight decided to endow their earlier prayer with a more ominous tinge - a clear sign that, even then, Louis XVI had known he was not up the job. In much the same way, in 1894, Nicholas's tears on becoming emperor seemed understandable in the context that his father had died very suddenly after a short illness and only an idiot would have looked upon the awesome task of ruling one-sixth of the Earth without reflecting on his personal capacities. By 1918, those tears had been re-written, even by Sandro, the main witness, who now claimed to have experienced an uneasy moment of foresight when he saw his cousin-tsar crying in front of him.

Nicholas II's weakness - his stupidity, his inability to make a decision, his incompetence - are often juxtaposed by the sympathetic assertion that allow he was a bad monarch, he was a good man. His devotion to his wife and their five children, coupled with the fact that hundreds of family photographs and letters managed to survive the revolution, are used to draw a clear distinction between his public failings and private virtues. Nicholas's love of physical exercise - even chopping wood and shoveling snow in winter - are subtly woven in by biographers to suggest that here was a man too simple, almost too good, to be tsar. After all, what kind of sovereign would enjoy such unkingly activities? Edward II, the English king deposed and murdered in 1327, enjoyed brick-laying and digging ditches; Louis XVI famously enjoyed working in a blacksmith's forge and was apparently a talented amateur locksmith. All three were unsuccessful rulers, but it seems an unhelpful and reductive dichotomy to suggest that a political, and specifically a royal, leader cannot execute their vocation properly if they happen to be interested in pastimes that are less-than-regal. Abraham Lincoln got his start splitting rails; Elizabeth I liked to do maths problems, linguistic translations and check her own household accounts; Frederick IX enjoyed conducting an orchestra; Prince Heinrich of Prussia could book-bind and Tsar Boris III of Bulgaria could drive steam engines. Equally, although many of history's great rulers were appalling family men, it does not necessarily follow that a being a faithful husband and attentive father with an interest in manual hobbies should equate with a dereliction of public duty.

The irony of the pervasive view that Nicholas II was chronically weak and indecisive is that it completely misrepresents Russian history - both the downfall of four hundred years of tsarism and the rise of eight fraught decades of Communism - because had Nicholas II been as malleable as Trotsky, Sandro and popular historiography suggests, his reign and the fate of the Russian monarchy would have been very, very different. In 1894, Nicholas dismissed calls for democracy in Russia as the agenda of "senseless dreamers." For an entire decade, despite mounting pressure, he maintained that position. It was only thanks to the near-total collapse of law and order during the riots of 1905, the assassination by nail bomb of his uncle Sergei and numerous government ministers, defeat in the war with Japan and the impassioned advice of his finance minister, Count Witte, that Nicholas gave way and granted Russia a constitution, a parliament and elections. He did so after much thought and under the assurance that this sacrifice would bring the uprising to an end. It did not and Nicholas never forgave Witte or the liberals for what he saw as an humiliating trick. Nonetheless, from 1906 until 1914, Nicholas stuck with the bastardized version of a constitutional monarchy that he and Witte had created. He was certainly as far to the Right as it was possible to go without actually being the wall, but he did not budge from that position. When it came to the matter of Rasputin, his wife's spiritual adviser ludicrously alleged to be her lover, Nicholas stuck to a middle course of allowing Rasputin access to the palace in order to pray over his haemophiliac son Alexei, which pacified the Empress and her clique, but refused to listen to Alexandra's increasingly-pious belief that Rasputin was in touch with the true will of the Russian people. Nicholas knew that his wife was on the verge of a near-permanent mental breakdown because of their son's health and that she blamed herself; her belief that Rasputin was a saintly, practically virginal, peasant man of God plucked from Siberia like the shores of Galilee was unshakable and although Nicholas did not agree with her, he always seemed to regard Rasputin as absurd but inoffensive and slightly quaint. He allowed Alexandra to talk about him, but until the final months of imperial rule, he never, ever listened to her too seriously.

It was only in the last two years of his rule, between assuming direct control of the imperial armies in 1915 and his abdication in 1917, that Nicholas began to show signs of being unfit to rule. The overwhelming impression that emerges from his surviving letters is here was a man suffering from war fatigue, exhaustion and nervous distress. The patriotic fervour of 1914 had given way to the horrifying realization that Russia was fighting two, and then three, and then four, enemies on the Eastern Front, single-handedly. The casualty figures were astronomical and, with little sleep and no way out apart from surrender to Germany, Nicholas seems to have shattered under the unheard-of pressure. That may not have been how his father would have reacted, but the point of this article is not to argue that Nicholas II was a great tsar. He wasn't. But he was, for the most part, an adequate one.

Had Nicholas been as spineless as he is so often presented, the Russian autocracy might have died in 1894 or 1906. It did not. Nicholas did everything he could to keep as much of it alive as possible. That decision turned out to be a disastrous one, but it was one he stuck to devotedly, even as it cost him much of his physical and mental health. He had neither the charisma nor chutzpah of earlier Russian sovereigns like Catherine the Great or Alexander I, but he was dedicated to his office and tireless in the amount of work he put into it. The image of a man caring for the devoted and unwell Alexandra, four beautiful daughters and one sickly son as his archaic empire fell apart around him is arresting, but it is also misleading. Nicholas II loved his wife, he loved his children, but he also loved his country and his dynasty and he did his best for them. 

Nicholas II was strong in his beliefs. Perhaps too strong. He ignored the advice of family members, even, at times, Alexandra's and his mother's, both of whom he's often accused of being dominated by. He was an ultra-conservative, who only moved briefly into the liberal camp because he believed it was best for Russia. He cracked under the pressure of the First World War, but before that he had defended and supported very talented men in his government - chief amongst them Peter Stolypin. It was that strength, bordering on obstinacy, which brought about some of the successes and many of the failures of Nicholas II's reign, which should not solely be remembered by the final two months that brought it to an end. So often reduced to a simplistic dismissal - "good man, bad tsar, weak and unprepared" - Nicholas II's reign deserves to be understood as far more complicated and far more nuanced than either his romantic defenders or his most vicious critics allow. Nicholas II's successes and failures are a reminder that all history is more complex than it's usually given credit for.

Meryl Streep's statement on the death of Lady Thatcher

Actress Meryl Streep, who won the Academy Award for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in the motion picture The Iron Lady (above), has issued a very moving and fair statement on the death of the former Prime Minister.

Margaret Thatcher was a pioneer, willingly or unwillingly, for the role of women in politics.  

It is hard to imagine a part of our current history that has not been affected by measures she put forward in the UK at the end of the 20th century. Her hard-nosed fiscal measures took a toll on the poor, and her hands-off approach to financial regulation led to great wealth for others.  

There is an argument that her steadfast, almost emotional loyalty to the pound sterling has helped the UK weather the storms of European monetary uncertainty. 

But to me she was a figure of awe for her personal strength and grit. To have come up, legitimately, through the ranks of the British political system, class-bound and gender-phobic as it was, in the time that she did and the way that she did, was a formidable achievement. To have won it, not because she inherited position as the daughter of a great man, or the widow of an important man, but by dint of her own striving. To have withstood the special hatred and ridicule, unprecedented in my opinion, levelled in our time at a public figure who was not a mass murderer; and to have managed to keep her convictions attached to fervent ideals and ideas – wrongheaded or misguided as we might see them now – without corruption – I see that as evidence of some kind of greatness, worthy for the argument of history to settle. To have given women and girls around the world reason to supplant fantasies of being princesses with a different dream: the real-life option of leading their nation; this was groundbreaking and admirable. 

I was honoured to try to imagine her late life journey, after power; but I have only a glancing understanding of what her many struggles were, and how she managed to sail through to the other side. I wish to convey my respectful condolences to her family and many friends.

The other Catherine Howard

History records three Catherine Howards who enjoyed prominence at the early modern English court - the first, and most famous, was the fifth wife of Henry VIII, executed for her alleged adultery in February 1542. The second, the Countess of Notthingham, was a kinswoman and close friend of Elizabeth I, whose death in 1602 hastened the elderly queen's spiral into depression.  The third, born Catherine Knyvet in 1564, enjoyed fame and notoriety at the court of King James I, the first sovereign to rule over both England and Scotland. She was close to the royal family and knew many of their secrets, but her career ended in disgrace and allegations of financial corruption.

Born into the gentry early in the reign of Elizabeth I, Catherine Knyvet was married while still a very young teenager to Robert Rich, a minor lord. (It is often erroneously stated that only the great aristocratic heiresses were married off at a comparatively young age in this period.) Levels of mortality being what they were, she was left a widow at the age of sixteen, but her family soon arranged for her to marry Thomas Howard, a younger son of the 4th Duke of Norfolk. Marriage to the Howards, who were related to the reigning Queen on her mother's side, brought young Catherine a place in one of the oldest and most prestigious families of the English aristocracy. However, the Howards' continued adherence to the Catholic faith made many in Elizabeth's government view them with suspicion and Thomas's father had perished on the executioner's block for allegedly plotting to marry Elizabeth's cousin and Catholic heir-presumptive, the deposed Queen of Scots. 

Like Catherine, Thomas had been married before - to his stepsister, Mary Dacre. She too had died young, leaving Thomas without children. Thomas, handsome, aristocratic and in his early twenties, was a good match, if he could manage to exhibit the Howards' genetic knack for overcoming the political disgrace of a loved one; Catherine, beautiful and charming, also seemed like a good choice for the younger son of a great family. Children soon followed with annual regularity - one child per year for the first twelve years of their marriage. Theophilus, the eldest, born in 1582, followed by Elizabeth, Robert, Gertrude (who sadly died in the year of her birth), William, Thomas, Catherine, Emily, Frances, Charles, Henry and John. There were also two more children, born slightly apart from one another, Edward and Margaret. In total, Catherine Howard bore her second husband fourteen children in seventeen years. 

Luckily, this growing brood had access to royal favour, since Queen Elizabeth had restored the title taken from Thomas at the time of his father's execution for treason - he was now Lord Thomas Howard again, a courtesy title he was entitled to as the son of a duke. He commanded a ship in the attack against the Spanish Armada in 1588 and he was vice-admiral in charge of the fleet that attacked the Spanish port of Cadiz in 1596. He helped suppress the Earl of Essex's rebellion against Elizabeth's rule in 1601, by which stage the Queen had indicated her confidence in him by making him a Knight of the Garter. Catherine had been appointed one as one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, eventually being given the prestigious post of Keeper of the Jewels, which in the past had been held by women close to the queens they served - women such as Katherine Parr's younger sister, Anne.

In 1603, when Elizabeth died without children, Thomas and Catherine enthusiastically supported the accession of Elizabeth's third cousin, the King of Scots. A Presbyterian with sympathy for Anglicanism and a passionate belief in absolute monarchy, James lacked the late Elizabeth's tact and charisma, but he was nothing like the drooling, repulsive moron of later Whig imagination. In return for their support for his succession, James raised Thomas to the aristocracy in his own right, making him head of a collateral branch of the Howards as Earl of Suffolk in his own right. (Elizabeth had previously made him a baron, but the rank of an earl brought with it much greater prestige and much larger income.) James liked Thomas and the new Danish-born queen consort, Anna, warmed immediately to Catherine Howard. Like the queen, the new Countess of Suffolk was vivacious, extravagant, glamorous and had a penchant for intrigue. The two couples became very close, with Catherine apparently standing as godmother for the short-lived royal child, Princess Sophia.

Thomas and Catherine knew the royal family's secrets, particularly concerning the King's sexuality. James's association with the funding and publication of the great translation of the Bible that still bears his name has led generations of his enthusiasts to dismiss the allegations concerning his homosexuality out-of-hand, but the work of historians like Leanda de Lisle, whose excellent account of James's accession After Elizabeth should not be missed, and Michael B. Young, prove almost conclusively that James was involved in several, if not numerous, affairs with members of his own gender. Catherine, apparently, was in the know and not only knew but found it to her advantage to help the King along. According to one well-placed source, the countess was arranging liaisons between her sovereign and several "choice young men," all of which made the Suffolks increasingly indispensable to the monarch. What Queen Anna made of this, if she knew at all, is unknown.

Catherine, however, used her position as royal favourite to line her pockets - sowing the seeds of her own ruin. She accepted money and gifts like sable-lined muffs and jewels in order to work men into royal favour, persuade the government to remit fines on offending individuals and promote friends and clients. Her sympathy for Catholicism and an alliance with Spain marked her out as suspicious to the more puritanical members of James's court and she was accused, perhaps unfairly, of taking lovers herself. Her children were all married into the ranks of the aristocracy, securing Thomas and Catherine's own political ascendancy.

In 1619, Catherine's friend and patron, Queen Anna, died and Catherine herself contracted smallpox. She survived but her handsomeness was gone. The queen's death and the loss of the countess's beauty marked the start a year of disaster for the Suffolks, as their financial and political corruption led to them facing trial, after their enemies at court finally persuaded the King to move against them. They lost royal favour and were banished from court. At the time, it was Catherine who was blamed for leading the family astray, with her husband Thomas being viewed with sympathy, even by those who detested his wife and her greed. Whether this was a true reflection of Catherine Howard's role in the scandal or simply a case of the woman being re-cast as Eve to her husband's Adam is uncertain. Her children continued to make a name for themselves at the court of Charles I, and her daughter Frances was caught in one of the last great scandals of James I's time, but Catherine Howard herself died in her late sixties or early seventies over a decade after losing the lucrative favour of King James. 

The death of Steven Simpson

There is a scene in Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” when the great cathedral’s bell-ringer is ritually humiliated by the citizens of Paris. The tolling of the bells has long since rendered Quasimodo deaf and on top of that, he is both mentally and physically handicapped. To the neoplatonic Middle Ages this did not make him more sympathetic, but rather an easy target to provide them with some passing amusement. Beneath the looming towers of Notre Dame and the carved eyes of a hundred saints and martyrs, the flesh and blood people of Hugo’s novel strip, beat and torture the innocent and uncomprehending bell-ringer, who does not know, and could not even understand, why they are doing this to him. All he can feel is pain, confusion and fear. He has been conditioned, all his life, to believe that he is less.

This week a 20-year-old British man called Jordan Sheard (above) received a jail sentence of three years and six months. Steven Simpson (below) was celebrating his eighteenth birthday when Jordan Sheard killed him. He was gay, he had Asperger’s Syndrome, he had epilepsy and he had a speech impediment. Before Jordan Sheard killed him, he persuaded the easily-intimidated Simpson to remove his top, after which he scrawled homophobic obscenities across his torso, smudged lipstick across his face and wrote the words “GAY BOY” on Steven’s head in black ink. Then, he started spraying him with tanning lotions and body oils, before flicking a lighter at him. As Steven went up in flames, Jordan Sheard ran away and later told everyone that Steven had started the fire himself. A few days later, the fire (which had been started on Steven’s groin) took his life; he died in great agony as a result of 60% burns. Faced with the evidence provided by numerous eyewitnesses, Jordan Sheard eventually admitted that he, not Steven, had set fire to the birthday boy’s crotch and then left others to try to save him. The presiding judge, Roger Keen QC, described the events that had taken Steven Simpson’s life as “good-natured horseplay” that tragically went wrong. For the humiliation, bullying, torturing and death of this young man, Jordan Sheard received three years and six months. 

Steven Simpson’s death is both a lesson and a tragedy. The human rights campaigner, Peter Tatchell, is absolutely right in calling the sentence “outrageously lenient.” Ben Summerskill OBE, speaking on behalf of the gay rights’ pressure group Stonewall, remarked that “the leniency with which the killer has been treated is disturbing.” Carol Povey, director for the Centre for Autism, added, “It is vital [that] disability hate crimes are punished with the same severity as other hate crimes.” The Crown Prosecution Services had wanted to try the case as a hate crime, but the judge would not allow it. After all, manipulating a vulnerable youth to perform like a circus freak for your amusement before you set him on fire is just “good-natured horseplay.”

But perhaps the best assessment of the chain of events that led to Steven Simpson’s death came from Tom Warburton, the prosecuting lawyer: “This was a cruel case of bullying based on Steven’s sexuality and disability. Steven had significant learning difficulties but was getting on well, and had recently started college where he was studying life skills. On his course he made some new friends and decided to have a few of them over to his house to celebrate his 18th birthday. The focus of the party quickly turned to Steven and his sexuality. He was encouraged to take off his shirt and dance around, he had obscene pictures and writing scrawled on his body, and he was sprayed with suntan oil. Had the horseplay ended there we may have had a different story to tell today. Sadly it didn’t. While we accept Jordan did not intend to kill Steven, his actions did lead to his death. His disability and sexuality were used as weapons against him, with the group of friends taking advantage of his naivety.”

Steven Simpson had little experience of socializing during his teenage years, because of his Asperger’s, his epilepsy and his learning difficulties. By all accounts, he was too trusting, too inexperienced and too naive to fully appreciate that he ought to have said ‘no’ to what he was being asked to do by his guests. But he had finally started to make friends at college and the relief that brought him can be imagined; buoyed along by the experience, he had decided to throw himself a birthday party, a brave move that backfired spectacularly. There are many reasons for explaining why Steven Simpson found himself in the position he did. It would be possible to “spin” this story as a tale of terrible bad luck, which seems to be the interpretation of the presiding judge. It would be equally possible to focus solely on the actions of Jordan Sheard who, having set fire to someone, ran away rather than try to help him and then tried to save his own hide by trying to foist all the blame for the fire onto the dying Steven. But focusing only on victim and perpetrator is a view that leaves out the audience.

During the course of the trial, one of the most disturbing details to emerge was that Sheard had been “egged on” by other guests there. (Guests who had, by most accounts, turned up because there was a party, not because they knew or liked Steven.) Having discovered the truth about his sexuality and his disability, they proceeded to bully Steven remorselessly – all under the camouflage of it being “banter,” no doubt. Or “good-natured horseplay.” Steven Simpson was not just the victim of a moment of madness that came out of nowhere; he was humiliated, bated and abused in the hour preceding his death. It was, in a very real way, pre-meditated. He was taunted and mocked and forced to perform like a Victorian circus freak. That he was bright, well-mannered, good-hearted and kind was obviously of absolutely no relevance to the cretins who surrounded him, stripped him, coated his body in degrading slogans and symbols and then deliberately placed a flame at his lotion-coated groin. Jordan Sheard may not have intended to kill Steven Simpson, but he certainly had no qualms about psychologically and physically abusing him. And, as he did so, his work was aided by a dozen helping hands, a dozen chanting voices, a dozen hyena laughs, loud, forced, competitive; others at the party did not step in until it was far, far too late. They are not guilty of a legal crime, but they are complicit in a moral one. They stood by; they let it happen. The old (and possibly apocryphal) statement attributed to Edmund Burke when he heard of the execution of Marie-Antoinette, that for evil to flourish it is necessary only for good men to do nothing, is true of all events, great and small, in history. If we do nothing to stop an injustice, we are complicit in it. If we allow injustices like Steven Simpson’s, we are not so very far removed from the chanting crowds of Victor Hugo’s novels. Or the Baroness Orczy’s, who described jeering crowds as ‘human, only in name.’

Jordan Sheard deserved much, much longer than forty months in jail. He killed that boy and he certainly intended to harm him. To suggest that this was all horseplay that had gone wrong is tantamount to saying that attacks on the vulnerable, for whatever reason, are excusable under certain circumstances.

Steven Simpson was vulnerable, but he was not less. He had his whole life ahead of him and he had worked hard to overcome the difficulties given to him by nature. He could not interact with people in the same way the majority of the population can and he could not fully understand the nuances of what was happening around him on the night he died. In that sense, he was an innocent and that detail gives his death an extra poignancy. But if our only reaction to Steven Simpson’s death is sorrow, then we are missing the point. There is much to be very, very angry about. In 2013, it is astonishing that this kind of behaviour should result in under four years in prison. It is jaw-dropping that a judge could refer to something like this as “good-natured horseplay.” It is both grievous and enraging that Steven Simpson’s parents have to live the rest of their lives knowing that the child they had loved, nurtured and worried over, spent the last hour of his life as a butt for the sadistic jokes of a bunch of braying morons who only stopped laughing at him when it was time to run away as he burned to death. Most of all, we should be furious and worried that not enough is being done to stop this; the verdict this week in Sheffield failed to send a clear message that behaviour like Jordan Sheard’s cannot and must not be tolerated in this country. Crimes like this must carry a penalty so harsh and unambiguous that it will discourage the trolls of our society from behaving like this again. Harsher punishments, at least, might protect more people like Steven Simpson. As Jordan Sheard showed us when he ran away, they certainly care about their own safety and wellbeing, at least.

Jordan Sheard and his cohorts asked the British justice system to say that they did not kill Steven Simpson – that what happened had been the result of a chain reaction of unlucky happenstance. By handing down a sentence as lenient as forty months, Judge Roger Keen agreed with them. He is saying that what happened to Steven Simpson was an accident that resulted in a needless death, not a process of deliberate cruelty – the kind that always carries with it the risks of a terrible outcome. This sentence says that the parading of Steven Simpson as a freak in the hour before his death, either because of his sexuality or his disability, was nothing more than good-natured horseplay that resulted in something unforeseeable. Judge Roger Keen implicitly sent a message that the law will not do enough to protect the vulnerable. There is a great quote from Shakespeare’s “King Richard the Third,” in which Richard stands and asks to be excused of the deaths he has caused: -

RICHARD

Say I slew them not.

LADY ANNE

Then say they were not slain.

But dead they are...

Steven Simpson died horribly, but the people in charge of avenging that are acting as if it was all just a game gone wrong.

"The Creation of Anne Boleyn" (review)

More nonsense has been written about Anne Boleyn than almost any other personality in British history. The six-fingered witch of Counter-Reformation propaganda was the most extreme re-imagining of Henry VIII's second wife, but the most enduring trope is that of an unpleasant, morally-dubious social climber who trampled on anyone who got in her way and who lied, bullied and manipulated her way onto the consort's throne. There is a pervasive view in modern literature and history that holds that although Anne Boleyn probably was not guilty of the crimes for which she perished in 1536, she nonetheless basically deserved her eventual fate. To paraphrase a popular television show, Anne played the game of thrones - and lost. She was a game player, who deserved neither pity nor special treatment. 

The problem with that view of Anne Boleyn is not only that it's factually inaccurate, but that it's also the intellectual brainchild of five hundred years of misogyny. Anne Boleyn may have played the political game like a man, but she perished as a woman. She was not dragged off her pedestal by political or financial allegations, but rather her enemies eviscerated her on the grounds of her gender. They played, shamelessly, to the worst kinds of paranoia about what women would do if they had power. At Anne's trial, lurid details of her alleged seduction of her brother, Lord Rochford, and her libidinous sexual approaches to other members of the royal court were included in the indictments - right the way down to a description of how she had used French kissing to inflame her brother into committing incest with her. It was character assassination in its basest form, intended to annihilate Anne's reputation and fill her judges with such revulsion that they would not hesitate to condemn her. To exonerate her would not only have been spitting in the face of the king's justice, but it could also look worryingly like tacit toleration for her perversions. 

In her new book The Creation of Anne Boleyn, academic Susan Bordo sets out to explore how and why Anne Boleyn's reputation has been shaped. Anne's story has inspired operas, plays, novels, television dramas and movies. She is a modern day industry in her own right; by far and away the most memorable of Henry's half-dozen wives, as Bordo wryly notes in her descriptions of Tudor fans' attempts to impose a kind of equality of interest on all six, despite the fact that all six are not equally interesting. And certainly not all equally important.

It is on this interaction between Boleyn's specter and popular culture that Bordo is at her strongest. Bordo is an expert on the academic politics of feminism and she goes to town on the allegedly "feminist" presentation of Anne in The Other Boleyn Girl (to date, a book that spawned a television drama that spawned a motion picture that spawned a thousand stupid questions). Equally interesting are her assessments of Hilary Mantel's Anne Boleyn, resurrected as a deeply unpleasant predator in the Cromwellian novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Bordo is kinder to Mantel than she is to Philippa Gregory, but she manages to set Wolf Hall's jarringly hostile portrayal of Anne in the context of a new kind of feminism and shows that the Boleyn of Wolf Hall and the Boleyn of The Other Boleyn Girl may be far apart in terms of literary skill, but perhaps not necessarily so in cultural inspiration. (Particular venom is reserved for Carolly Erickson's The Favored Queen, and rightly so.)

Bordo is similarly strident in her dissection of modern academia's interest in Anne. She excoriates G.W. Bernard's recent (and very controversial) biography of Anne Boleyn as "a sensationalistic, poorly argued extension of an equally flimsy scholarly article from 1991" and argues (again rightly) that no peer critiqued Bernard's arguments with the rigour they deserved because he was part of an old boys' network of professional historians. Bordo manages to deftly balance searching for the real Anne and the Anne of historical opinion with the Anne of modern pop culture. In doing so, she has managed to keep her finger on the pulse of both emerging academic papers and things like Facebook, fan pages, successful TV shows and movies. This is a book that takes pop culture seriously and in doing so produces an utterly fascinating view of how historical reputations are shaped and made. A particularly fascinating section comes from her private interviews with two actresses famous for their on-screen portrayals of Boleyn - Canadian Genevieve Bujold, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in 1969's Anne of the Thousand Days and Natalie Dormer, who deservedly won legions of fan for playing Anne in the Showtime television series, The Tudors. Dormer's section on how she worked hard to give her Anne more depth and passion, and the lengths she went to as an actress to perfect her characterization, will be interesting to students of theatre and acting, as much as to those of gender and history.

There are a few, very, minor errors in The Creation of Anne Boleyn - for instance, at one point Bordo refers to Anne Boleyn's sister, Mary, as "thought by many to be the prettier of the two". There are no contemporary descriptions of Mary Boleyn's appearance, whatsoever. Quite probably because she was never judged important enough to be noticed in the way her sister was. However, Bordo is technically right in writing this, because somehow and from somewhere, the myth grew that Mary was the most beautiful of Thomas Boleyn's two daughters. Gaining validity by no surer virtue than that endowed by repetition the story of Mary Boleyn's prettiness is a reminder of the power that oft-repeated but unverifiable myths have on our perceptions of the past.

Finding errors in The Creation of Anne Boleyn, however, is essentially nit-picking. This is an erudite and thoroughly researched examination of an enormous and very interesting topic. Tracing Anne's reputation in the sources of her own time, who said what and why, right the way through the dramas and novels of subsequent centuries, down to the biographies and silver screen adaptations, Susan Bordo has produced a witty, compelling, convincingly argued and gloriously interesting book about one of England's most undeservedly notorious women. The Creation of Anne Boleyn is as fascinating as a commentary on modern culture, media and sexism as it is in discussing how a queen who died five hundred years ago has managed to remain the subject of so much fascination - producing the sublime, the intelligent, the bigoted and the ridiculous. 

Huffington Post profiles "The Immaculate Deception"

Journalist Scott De Buitléir's interview with me about writing is now available online through Huffington Post: Books. I hope you enjoy it and thanks to Scott for a lovely interview.

The Taoiseach's apologises to the survivors of the Magdalene Laundries

The publication of a report into the appalling conditions in the religiously-run Magdalene Laundries for "fallen" women in 20th century Ireland and the extent to which the Irish State funded, aided and supported those institutions has led to a public, and very moving, apology from Ireland's Taoiseach (prime minister), Enda Kelly, in which he excoriated the rose-tinted view of Ireland's past as a place of proper values and said that the Magdalene Laundries stand as a grim testament to the difference between being prim and being good. Many of the women incarcerated in the Magdalene laundries, where they were forced to work without wages in cavernous fee-charging laundries for weeks, months or years, were children, victims of rape, unwanted daughters and the mentally handicapped. They were abominable institutions, but when the 2002 movie The Magdalene Sisters (trailer above) first came out a decade ago, it was decried by some of the institutional Church's most zealous defenders as nothing more than secuarlist propaganda. As the McAleese report makes clear, in fact the fictionalized account of the Magdalene sisters, which was part of the first wave of Ireland beginning to look at the less-attractive side of the laundries, barely scratched the surface. The Taoiseach's apology and statement is moving, intelligent, carefully-worded and it avoids, I think, inflammatory rhetoric. It places the blame as much on social attitudes as the Church hierarchy and does not seek to foist the blame onto any one institution. His full and frank apology for the government's role in sustaining the laundries has long been campaigned for by the survivors of the Magdalene system.

The Taoiseach's full speech can be watched below. I realize now everyone may share my opinion of it, but I think it was long overdue and a tribute to Ireland - most especially the women it was speaking of.