Too Bad to Die

Francine Mathews’ thriller Too Bad to Die features none other than Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels, as the hero who must save the lives of the “Big Three” from an assassination attempt during World War II.

President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Premier Joseph Stalin are meeting in Cairo and Tehran with their various entourages, to plan an invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. As they debate the various aspects of the proposed invasion, Roosevelt struggles with ill health. Churchill, in the meantime, is growing in distrust of Stalin while fighting bronchitis. Stalin, of course, is looking beyond the war to expanding the Soviet empire. After M16 agent Fleming is informed by code breaker Alan Turing that a double agent known only as “the Fencer” is in their midst, plotting to kill the three leaders, he finds that he is also a target.

Thus begins an adventure as harrowing as anything that might happen to Fleming’s protagonist James Bond. Writing with elegance and grit, Mathews keeps the reader in a state of suspense, venturing into the world of high diplomacy as well as into the sewers of the underworld. Both worlds are places where deals are made, sometimes at the price of a soul or two. Mathews explores the psyches of her characters during the tense days and cocktail-drenched nights in Tehran. Fleming’s brains and intrepidity, his inner conflicts as well as his suave recklessness, make him a character as intriguing as one in his own books.

This review was originally published in the May 2015 edition of the Historical Novels Review.

(*The book was sent to me by the Historical Novel Society in exchange for my honest opinion.)

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Paintings of Chantilly

From Reading Treasure:

Filleul, like many of her royal paintings, did not survive the revolution. She was denounced to the Committee of Public Safety for wearing mourning for Louis XVI in 1794, and was arrested for attempting to sell royally commissioned furniture from the Chateau de la Muette. Anne-Rosalie had once lived at Muette and was appointed Superintendent of the chateau by Marie Antoinette after her husband's death. However, because all royally commissioned furniture was considered seized property of the new Republic, Anne-Rosalie, along with companion Marguerite-Émilie Chalgri, were charged with 'theft and concealment of property belonging to the Republic.' They were found guilty and sentenced to death.

Of the Filluel paintings that did survive to present day, few are quite as charming as her pastel paintings of the Chateau de Chantilly gardens. Her paintings capture the simple, sometimes rustic, yet overwhelmingly beautiful English-style gardens that came into vogue among the French upper elite in the 1770s and 1780s. (Read more.)

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A Nigerian Bishop Speaks Out

From Ave Maria Radio:

My personal opinion of Hillary Clinton is: She is seeking election in America so you can expect that, like most politicians, she will say just about anything to pander to the thoughts of whatever audience she is speaking to.

So I really think that Hillary Clinton is just speaking for votes, rather than speaking for reason.

I believe there are three groups of people in this world: those who believe in God, those who do not believe in God, and those who think they are gods. Hillary Clinton I think is one of those who thinks she is a god. And I’m not obliged to believe that.

From the way she spoke, people like herself very clearly don’t want to hear anything about God. Even if they say they believe in God, they really don’t.

It’s evident even in her language: she talks about “deep seated cultural codes”. I feel she’s gotten too wrapped up in technology and has stopped realizing that there are values, there are things that are innate to people, that are not just “codes” that can be taken up and thrown out.

We talk about the dignity of life, the sanctity of life, etc. Is she saying they ought to be changed? Well, I don’t know what she is talking about. What are human beings going to change to?

We are saying that there is something innate in us as Africans that makes us Africans.

And I am saying that God, in His infinite wisdom — which I think might be a little bit more than Hillary Clinton’s — decided to create us in these forms to add to the beauty of his creation. So those who work to have one generalized, undifferentiated world certainly don’t know the meaning of beauty, which is found in variety, in color.

If these values are not precious to Hillary Clinton, I think she has no right at all to call for a change in religious values and religious beliefs.

She also called them “structural biases.” Again, that is a misuse of language. “Biases,” to many people, are the things that make them who they are.

So that’s as much importance as I attach to Hillary Clinton’s statement about cultural beliefs. It is my desire that the American people open their ears and their eyes and know exactly what kind of people are running to be the next President of the United States. (Read more.)

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Tales from the 18th Century Old Bailey

From Madame Gilflurt:

In 2017, Pen and Sword will publish my second non-fiction work, Tales from the 18th Century Old Bailey. The book will offer a peek into the annals of the most famous criminal court in the world, in what must arguably be the most tumultuous century in British history. In an era when the Bloody Code sent thousands of men and women to the gallows and saw children transported to the far side of the world for what seem now like the most trivial of wrongdoings, an appointment with the judges of the Old Bailey was the last thing any self-respecting miscreant wanted to receive!

From bloody murder to impulsive shoplifting via not so dandy highwaymen and the real stories behind Mother Clap’s Molly House, a microcosm of Georgian society passed through the Old Bailey as tragic prostitutes and murderous hangmen alike found themselves standing before the bench. (Read more.)

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Madame la Dauphine

Marie-Antoinette as Dauphine. Via Vive la Reine. Share

Modesty and Respect

From Modesty Honors Beauty:

Walking down the hallway, you spot a stranger coming from the other direction. In attempt to avoid awkwardness, you look down at your phone and pretend like you are checking your texts. I’m guilty of this scenario. In reality, it is so much more pleasant and less awkward to put your phone down, smile at the stranger, and ask him how his day is going. Or even a simple hello will do. YOUR smile has the capacity to not only brighten the day of others, but to also brighten your own day. Manners show respect, whether it be a smile, a quick greeting, or a simple “please” and “thank you”. (Read more.)

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Death of Louis XV

From Madame Gilflurt:

Although he initially seemed to rally, fate had other plans in mind for the monarch and Louis suffered an agonising death, his body blackened and rotting with the infection. After being placed in his coffin and covered with alcohol and linens, the king's remains were  interred in the Basilica of Saint Denis, his near six decade reign coming to a painful and unhappy end. (Read more.)

Louis XV repented on his deathbed for the public scandal he had given, confessing to the blind and holy priest Abbé Maudoux, who later became Marie-Antoinette's confessor. (From Léon de la Brière's Madame Louise de France, p.66) Share

Baltimore: A "Great Society" Failure

From Politico Magazine:

President Barack Obama responded to the Baltimore riots with a heartfelt bout of self-righteous hectoring.

Supposedly, we all know what’s wrong with Baltimore and how to fix it, but don’t care enough. The president seems to believe that if only we all had the wisdom and the compassion of Barack Obama, Baltimore would already be on the mend. Not only is this attitude high-handed and insulting, it rests on a flagrantly erroneous premise.

Obama doesn’t have the slightest idea how to fix Baltimore. While parts of his diagnosis are sound — communities like West Baltimore obviously lack for fathers and business investment — his solutions fall back on liberal bromides going back 50 years.

Obama said, cuttingly, that this Congress won’t approve “massive investments in urban communities.” Dating back to the Kerner Commission in the aftermath of the riots of the 1960s, the left’s go-to solution to urban problems has been more social programs. Since then, we’ve gotten more social programs — and just as many urban problems.

Exhibit A is Baltimore itself. The city hasn’t been “neglected.” It has been misgoverned into the ground. It is a Great Society city that bought into the big-government vision of the 1960s more than most, and the bitter fruit has been corruption, violence and despair.
All you need to know about the confused ineffectuality of the city’s leadership was evident in the purposefully inadequate initial response to the mayhem, apparently on the theory that a little rioting is OK.

And why not? The left has a soft spot for rioters. As soon as the windows start breaking, it rolls outs its intellectually rancid excuse-making for the destruction of property.

As police cars burned and businesses were ransacked, progressives declared nonviolence “a ruse” (Ta-Nehisi Coates); hailed looting as “a legitimate political strategy” (Salon); and called the senseless rampage part of a series of, sententiously all-caps, “UPRISINGS” (Marc Lamont Hill).

The lesson is that when the revolution comes, you best not own or operate a small business, or especially a CVS (drugstores, apparently, are notorious enemies of the people).

To its credit, Baltimore called in the National Guard (i.e., “militarized” its police) and stopped the looting. This is better than the alternative. The deeper problem is that much of Baltimore is a disaster even when no one is rioting.

The city has been shedding jobs and people for decades, including in the 1990s when the rest of the country was booming.

We don’t know all the facts surrounding Freddie Gray’s tragic, and highly suspicious, death. But as a general matter, it is easy to believe that the Baltimore police are corrupt, dysfunctional and unaccountable — because most of the Baltimore government is that way. Mayors and police commissioners get convicted of crimes.

This is a failure exclusively of Democrats, unless the root causes of Baltimore’s troubles are to be traced to its last Republican mayor, Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, who left office in 1967. And it is an indictment of a failed model of government.

Baltimore is a hostile business environment and high-tax city, with malice aforethought. “Officials raised property taxes 21 times between 1950 and 1985,” Steve Hanke and Stephen Walters of Johns Hopkins University write in The Wall Street Journal, “channeling the proceeds to favored voting blocs and causing many homeowners and entrepreneurs — disproportionately Republicans — to flee. It was brilliant politics, as Democrats now enjoy an eight-to-one voter registration advantage.”

To counterbalance the taxes, they note, developers need to be lured to the city with subsidies, and the developers, in turn, contribute to politicians to stay in their good graces. This makes for fertile ground for the city’s traditional corruption.

Baltimore’s preferred driver of growth has been government. Urban experts Fred Siegel and Van Smith write in City Journal that Baltimore has “emphasized a state-sponsored capitalism that relies almost entirely on federal and state subsidies, rather than market investments.” The model makes for some high-profile development projects, but trickle-down crony capitalism hasn’t worked for everyone else.

For those left behind, Maryland has one of the most generous welfare systems in the country, according to Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute. (Read more.)

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Tragedy on the Potomac

From Boothie Barn:

After the assassination of President Lincoln on April 14, 1865, the Black Diamond was assigned picket duty on the Potomac River.  Her job was to patrol the Potomac, keeping an eye out for the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, if he attempted to cross the river.  On the night of April 23, the world was unaware that Booth and his conspirator David Herold had already crossed the Potomac and were that night sleeping in the cabin of William Lucas in King George County, Virginia.  The Black Diamond lay at anchor about a mile south of St. Clement’s Island.

It was a clear night but there was no moon.  The Black Diamond was said to have had only had one light showing.  Somehow, it wasn’t seen in the darkness.  At around 10 o’clock p.m. on April 23, the Massachusetts and its 400 passengers collided with the Black Diamond and her twenty crew.

What follows is a newspaper account of the incident recalled by Corporal George Hollands in 1914.  Hollands was one of the soldiers aboard the Massachusetts who had spent time at Andersonville prison.  His account provides a vivid description of the tragedy:

“…About 10 o’clock at night, when we were all cuddled down for a night’s sleep, part on the upper deck and part below — myself and my bunkmates were stretched out on the lower deck — we heard an awful crash and felt a sudden jar. We all sprang to our feet, pulled on our coats and ran up on deck to see what the trouble was. All was confusion and excitement, as we discovered we had crashed into the side of another boat, striking her amidship.

I ran to the bow of our boat, as most of the others had done, and found her bow was settling fast. The Captain was shouting to us to go aft, so as to keep her bow out of the water as much as possible. In the meantime we were shouting to the boat we had run into — the Black Diamond — to come to our assistance. She circled around and came up alongside of us, and about 150 jumped from the Massachusetts to the deck of the Black Diamond. I was among the first to board her, and I ran immediately to the man at the wheel and asked him if the boat was all right. He said: “No; she is sinking.” I then made up my mind that we had “jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire.” I immediately turned to go toward the stern of the boat, and in going I stumbled onto a stepladder which had been torn from the hurricane deck.

I grabbed up the ladder and was about to jump overboard with it — scores of the boys had already jumped overboard to avoid the suction of the boat as she went down — when all of a sudden the thought came to me that the river was not deep enough to engulf the masts and all, so I threw down the ladder, grabbed one of the guyropes and began climbing up toward the mast.

I soon landed my foot on the yard-arm and got my arms around the mast, and about that time the boat struck bottom, with her deck only about two feet under water. I found three or four of the crew among the rigging, so they evidently were of the same mind as I concerning the depth of the river.
We clung to our positions all night, and could hear the cries for help in all directions from the boys who had jumped overboard.

A drummer boy of the 16th Conn. had been washed overboard and had grasped hold of the keel of the boat, or something else, and was hanging on for dear life and calling for help. One of the crew up in the rigging got hold of a rope and time and time again threw it to where the boy was, telling him to grab for it. The boy couldn’t get hold of it. Every now and then a wave would wash over him and strangle him, and as he would emerge from it he would call for the rope. He finally became exhausted and cried out to us that he could hold out no longer. He told us his name, but I have forgotten it. [George W. Carter] He said he was a drummer of Co. D, 16th Conn., and asked us to inform his mother that he was drowned. He bade us goodby, and as the next wave washed over him he loosened his hold and sank beneath the waves.

We clung to our position until daylight, when we were discovered and picked up by a small United States gunboat or revenue cutter and transferred to our old boat, the Massachusetts, which, with one wheel out of commission and part of her bow carried away, had floated about in the vicinity during the night and picked up those she could of our comrades who had jumped overboard.

After we were safe onboard the Massachusetts made her way slowly down the river, and about 11 o’clock a.m. she sighted a large steamer lying at anchor. She steered for her and ran alongside, and we were immediately transferred to the larger boat…”

As recalled by Hollands, in the moments after the collision many aboard the Massachusetts thought that it was their ship that was going to sink.  The panicked soldiers, who had already experienced hardship and fear far beyond their years, jumped into the river with anything that would float.  Many, like Hollands, sought sanctuary on the Black Diamond.  However, the impact of the Massachusetts had struck the Black Diamond in the boiler and she quickly took on water.  It was said the Black Diamond sank in about three minutes. (Read more.)

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