Tea at Trianon: Ewan McGregor: A Brothers’ Guide to Scotland

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, May 20, 2024

Ewan McGregor: A Brothers’ Guide to Scotland

From Expedia Magazine:

“There’s always a moment of silence,” says Ewan McGregor, “when you reach the top of the mountain, and you don’t need words. You just stop and look and drink it in: that sense of scale and space. And then you open your sandwiches.” The actor swapped the forest-covered peaks of Scotland for the star-studded hills of Hollywood years ago, but his fierce love for his native land has never dimmed: its shimmering, majestic lochs, its ruined castles, its windswept, ever-changing weather, and its warm, whisky-laced welcome in cozy pubs with flickering fires.
Expedia has brought McGregor—bona fide box-office superstar, travel obsessive and the voice of our TV ads—back to his homeland to be reunited with his brother Colin, a former Royal Air Force fighter pilot turned instructor. From Colin’s home in Elgin, 175 miles north of Edinburgh, the pair are headed into the Scottish wilderness in search of the northern lights. This natural phenomenon, which paints the night sky in spectacular swathes of green and blue, is currently doing its awe-inspiring thing in all sorts of places it never normally would (read more here)—lighting up both the epic mountains of the Highlands, and Scottish Twitter. (Read more.)