Word: angevin
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Henry II (Tom Hughes) loves being king. At 50, he has built the Angevin Empire, has three sons and has married the most powerful and desirable woman in Europe, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Suzanne Rose). The only problem is that his sons are weak and unsatisfactory heirs, his wife has staged a rebellion against him and he himself is growing...
...crumbling walls of its Angevin castle still keep guard over Lundy's only landing place, whence the medieval barons De Marisco once dispatched their men to raid the coast of England. It was from Lundy that the elegant 17th century pirate "Admiral" Nutt defied the Royal Navy; where the smuggler Mr. Thomas Benson, M.P., fired on all ships that did not dip their flags; and where a family called Heaven once ruled a kingdom of the same name. The islanders still point to the treacherous rocks that surround them and gleefully tell of the time a great galleon...
...Peculiarities of national speech make it nearly impossible for a Greek to pronounce a b, an Arab a p, a Russian an h, a Frenchman a th. In the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, when Sicilians rebelled against their Angevin overlords, those suspected of being Frenchmen were forced, in an irresistible repeat of the Biblical shibboleth, to repeat the Italian phrase ceci e ciceri, and slaughtered when they could not manage the Italian ch sound...
...Lady Margaret survives the harrowing siege of Bedford and the fall of the House of Brealte, repudiates her husband, eventually suffers the ignominious fate of ostracism. In Leopards and Lilies, talented Author Duggan (The Little Emperors) is caught with his drawbridge down: the story is not as fleet as Angevin England's fast-moving Leopard banners. But, as usual, Duggan has a thorough grasp of the political and social hanky-panky of his period. The publisher offers unsatisfied buyers of the book any substitute title they may pick off the current bestseller list, but current bestsellers being what they...
...Eleanor of Aquitaine" is really more a story of the Angevin Empire than a biography of Eleanor, for it strays from Eleanor for hundreds of pages to report Henry's consolidations of his vast holdings. For a biography, there is not enough Eleanor; for a history, almost too much...