The Worst Review I Have Ever Read

I like Laurie Penny’s writing, but its not subtle. Laurie’s recent review of a Game of Thrones was so poor that it has driven me to write a review of her review. Necessarily, here be Spoliers, beware. Superficially Game of Thrones appears like a normal, goodies versus baddies fantasy adventure. Were it my job to write about it though, I might bother to gain more than a superficial understanding of the stories plots and themes. This is over a thousand words of take down, which is relevant to hardly anyone, so I’m putting the rest below the fold.

Filed under: Society, The Media, Game of Thrones, George R R Martin, Laurie Penny

No, not really

…a substantial proportion of us still think of the monarchy as an embarrassment at best, and at worst, to quote Cooke, “dangerous to the liberty, safety and public interest of the people”…

I don’t think seeking analogies between Charles I and Elizabeth the II is the best way to gain support for the republican cause. At least not with the historically literate. I believe that Andrew Marr’s The Diamond Queen must have been terrible watching for a republican, but that is no excuse to play fast and loose with history.

In the seventeenth century there was an ever-present danger of expropriation, a collision of landed and merchant interests and religious persecution; all of which often pursued to the point of death.

This meant the royal family really were  ”dangerous to the liberty, safety and public interest of the people.” But not, of course, the sort of “freedom from want” liberty Laurie subscribes to, but a bourgeois liberty for capitalists to operate without interference. Today, the soon to be Charles III has been mean about some architects…

 Although lines like this from our Laurie do make one titter:

Instead, we are served a twee little panegyric to the many unlikely hats of Elizabeth Windsor. 

Filed under: Blogging, History, English Civil War, Laurie Penny, Religion