Benjamin Woolley

This book certainly helped me to put Ada's life in a larger perspective-- I was surprised to find how little emphasis was put on her work with Babbage and his Analytical Engine. The breadth and variety of Ada's experiences leads to quite a long biography, with the amount of time devoted to each part of her life dependent not just on the interest of the biographer but also largely on the amount of remaining documentation. Overall, I thought it was pretty well balanced. When starting the book it seemed at first that too much time was spent with her parents, but as I continued it became clear what an enormous effect their separation and Lord Byron's celebrity had on Ada throughout her life, and in retrospect I think it was page space well spent.

I thought Woolley did a good job of transporting the reader into the historical time period and Ada's mentality specifically -- for example, once he mentions that Ada called her mother's cadre of morally acceptable friends "the Furies", they are never referred to as anything else. He gives a lot of good background on certain fads and technological developments that shaped the era, though sometimes to the point of straying a little too far from Ada herself. Additionally I think that his face-value use of the idea of "hysteria" was accurate to Ada's own conception of herself but could have used some of that historical context treatment.
… (mais)

History is littered with stories of royal favourites who’ve clawed their way up from modest roots to dazzling heights of influence – but few did so quite as spectacularly as George Villiers. At the age of twenty, the future Duke of Buckingham had precious little going for him. He was a penniless gentleman, the second son of a second marriage, whose dead father had left everything to the children of his first marriage. In most cases this would have been a one-way ticket to obscure poverty, but George had several key advantages. He had a remarkably tenacious and ruthless mother, Mary Villiers, who recognised potential when she saw it. He had extraordinary good looks, remarkable charisma and intelligence. He (Mary decided) would be the catalyst by which his family dragged themselves to wealth and power – and there was one very obvious way to do that: to catch the king’s eye. This is one of British history’s great stories of social climbing, and Woolley delves into the detail with relish – even if I felt the book lacked the vivacity and panache that its captivating subject wielded with such ease...

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2019/11/06/the-kings-assassin-benjamin-woolley/… (mais)

In Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America, Benjamin Wooley writes, “One of the great questions of history, which it is the purpose of this book to consider, is how such a morsel of colonial ambition, popped into the mouth of the Chesapeake in 1607, could, a few centuries later, produce a nation capable of disgorging the most powerful navy ever to sail the high seas?” (pg. xvii). He continues, “Their mission had been shaped not by the prospect of a colonial adventure in North America so much as by convulsive events back home. Powerful forces unleashed by the Protestant Reformation, and the spread of the Muslim Ottoman Empire to the east, had shaken the very foundations of European civilization” (pg. xvii). To this end, “Though the Indians were called ‘savages’ by the English, and their homeland a ‘savage kingdom’, the interlopers well knew, and half acknowledged, that it was their own savagery, horribly exposed in the religious wars in Europe and carried like an infection across the ocean, that was the greater threat” (pg. xviii). Wooley concludes, “The story of England’s attempt to colonize America is much closer to that of Prospero and Caliban than the pious Pilgrims” (pg. xviii). Furthermore, “It is about being caught in a dirty struggle to survive, haunted by failure, hungering for escape, dreaming of riches and hoping for redemption” (pg. xviii).… (mais)