When you really look at history, it is amazing how many women you CAN find. In today’s Guardian a review of The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece by Carola Hicks.

Hicks makes an elegant and intriguing counter-claim for a female patron, a woman who was herself an expert in this historically feminine artistic medium, and had a personal stake in finding a subtle accommodation between Saxon and Norman accounts of the conquest: Edith, widow of Edward the Confessor and sister of the defeated king Harold, who was reconciled to the conqueror’s regime after 1066 as an honoured Saxon survivor among the new Norman aristocracy.

The tapestry’s iconic status also precipitated bitter battles among 18th and 19th-century historians, dividing English from French, male from female. Two redoubtable women give this story its heart. The engaging and astute Eliza Stothard first encountered the tapestry on her honeymoon in 1818, her artist husband having been commissioned to paint an exact copy for the Society of Antiquaries, only to find herself dogged by a false accusation that she had stolen a fragment of the fabric. She was finally exonerated just before her death, by now a prolifically successful historical novelist, at the age of 92. And Elizabeth Wardle, wife of a master dyer from Leek in Staffordshire who was one of William Morris’s closest collaborators, led a team of 37 women to create a full-scale replica of the entire tapestry, “so that England should have a copy of its own”.

Well this evening I cycled to the first cricket net of the season while wearing long johns. The temperature was zero degrees, or at least close enough to that as to make no difference.

That definitely counts as a new experience. It wasn’t on my list of things to do – like visiting Persepolis or riding the Trans-Siberian – but it was a new experience.

In a production of Shakepeare that gets the delivery right, the language itself is magical, fantasmagorical. As a member of the audience you can just sit and let the flow of words reach deep inside, to tug at the core of your being.

That’s what you expect when you go to see a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and that’s what you get with Trade, one of the plays of its “New Work” season, which has just arrived at the Soho Theatre in London. It is just that the topic — women sex tourists — might be not quite what you are expecting.

This is the dialogue of a rap song, turned to blank verse. The characters pick up each others’ words and bounce them off each other in a rapid-fire song that is music without tune. The writer, Debbie Tucker Green, will definitely be someone to watch.

The scene is a stretch of perfect white sand – just like the brochures – and it opens with three bored women – the kind of “massage, hair-breading, jewelry-sellers” you’ve seen on beaches from Vietnam to The Gambia. Jets roar overhead, money jingles, but none of it is going to them. READ MORE

Tony Blair is looking more frazzled and fragile by the day, but it is Sir Ian, who really, surely can’t last much longer. The Metropolitan Police Commission is now facing questioning under caution over the shooting by his officers of the Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent electrician who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Si Ian reacted at the time as though this was a minor unfortunate incident, as though the two-year-old hadn’t made it to the pottie on time. Since then he’s demonstrated further his sheer cloddishness (comments on the Soham murders) and, again, his total disrespect – indeed seemingly lack of awareness of the existence of – basic human rights, such as privacy, by secretly taping conversations with his superiors.

But this might, hopefully, be the final straw to get rid of a dangerously incompetent man: he has two defences – he didn’t know what was going on in his own force, or he lied about it. Good choice.

BTW: for non-British readers, these Blairs aren’t related, even though it sometimes looks like they are.
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Try to always find some good news, and today’s is a campaign against forced marriages.

THE actress and writer Meera Syal attacked forced marriages yesterday and told parents to stop sacrificing their children’s lives. Syal, star of The Kumars at No 42, joined a government campaign that warns parents that they face prosecution if they force their children into marriage.
Television commercials and press advertisements will spearhead a drive to educate them about the difference between arranged and forced marriages. They will feature two hands wearing wedding rings chained together.

My 19th-century “blogger”, Frances Williams Wynn, is today spreading some gossip about French royalty and their hangers-on, and one in particular:

A Miss W., who some fifty years ago was an admired singer on the English stage, made a conquest of a Mr. A., a man of large property, who married her. Whether the lady’s character was not immaculate, or whether, the march of intellect not having begun, actresses of the best character were not yet reckoned fit society for ladies, does not appear; certain it is that, finding she could not get any society in England, the A.’s went to establish themselves at Versailles, where they took a fine house, gave fetes, &c. &c. His wealth gave splendour; her beauty, her singing, her dancing, gave charm.

The Polignacs came to her fetes, and afterwards introduced her to the little society, to the intimate reunions, of which Marie Antoinette was a constant member. When adversity befell this object of admiration, of almost idolatry, Mrs. A. devoted herself, her talents and (better than all) her purse to her service. It was chiefly during the Queen’s melancholy abode in the Temple that Mrs. A. most exerted herself. In bribes, in various means employed for the relief of the poor Queen, she expended between 30,000 and 40,000 sterling.

This of course was taken under the name of a loan, and soon after the Restoration Mrs. A. made a demand upon Louis XVIII.: every item of her account was discussed and most allowed, till they came to a very large bribe given to the minister of police, one to the gaoler, and bribes to various persons, to manage the escape of the Dauphin and the substitution of a dying child in his place.

Louis XVIII. Would not agree to this article, and insisted upon its being erased from the account as the condition upon which he would order the gradual liquidation of the rest of the debt. To this condition Mrs. A. would not accede: Louis XVIII. died: the accounts were again brought forward. Charles X. was just going to give the order for
paying the debt by instalments when the revolution came, and Mrs. A. seems now further than ever from obtaining any part of her money.

Don’t suppose anyone has any idea of who Mrs. A might be?

French royalty is one subject that I’ve never really got into, although Miss Williams Wynn’s words today do remind me of that delightful, whimsical little Steinbeck novel, The Short Reign of Pippin IV. Quite unlike his other work, but good fun.