Georgia - happy to see someone else reading "The Moonflower Vine"... It was a title I found somewhere and dug up and enjoyed. I've been reading (and reminding myself) how to write by reading "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. A book straight out of the late 1970's, Zinsser was/is? a prof at Yale and has a journalist's background. It's more of a primer than anything, but he has a good sense of humor and I've finally learned the plural of "genius" is "genii". And then speaking of well written, I am also reading and enjoying "Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain" by Judith Flanders which is *packed* with detail about this time. Obsessed with Victorians as I seem to be, this is a great read and I'm having fun. However, it suffers from a steady stream of typos which is a bit distracting. Speaking of distracting, I am also reading "Skippy Dies" by Paul Murray about a death in an Irish boarding school. Light hearted and the writing is fine, but whoever decided to "translate" all the English/Irish bits into "American" needs to smothered. "Mum" or "Mam" is now "Mom". "Shopping Center" is now "mall" and numerous other examples. Unless things have been decidedly American in my long absence from living in UK?... All good reads if you're not too pedantic about stuff other than the story. (The pains of being an editor.) :-)

America is funny about measurements as well - around here, everyone is very focused on old measurements (like foot and inches), and I tend to think that way as well except for very small measurements when I think cm and mm... Weather is always 32 is freezing... Reading-wise: read three books last weekend: * The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie --- never read any of hers before, and have not really read much mystery so this was fun even though you have to keep track of five million different characters! * My Jim - Nancy Rawles -- a new perspective on Huck Finn and his friend Jim... This is from the POV of Jim's wife who he left when he went down the river w Huck.. and told through a generational perspective. Reminded me in parts of "How to Make an American Quilt" as the book was structured around the sewing of a quilt... Once I got used to the strong dialect, this book was really good... * The Doctor's Wife - Sawako Ariyoshi -- the fictionalised story (but based on true events) of the first doctor in seventeenth century Japan to use anasthetic (sp?) forty years before Western docs found the use for chloroform. Interesting to read about how life was organized for the hierarchy of feudal Japan and its families... Now reading Elisabeth Bumiller's The Secrets of Mariko, a NF that follows the life of an ordinary Japanese family from the wife's perspective in the late 1990's... (Interested to see if much has changed in the few centuries between the settings of these two books..) Plus curious to see if it's like that new NF out right now about the parenting style of a Chinese-Am family... Trying to read more books from other countries and about other countries (i.e. non US, non Canada, non UK)... Aussie ok. :-)

Carolyn and Merry, after reading the book mentioned above it appears that the court tried to 'get her' on a charge of spying. The German trial dealt with over 80 people in one day and no prisoners had been allowed to be seen by a defence lawyer. None of the court justices spoke French, the prisoners didn't speak German. Nurse Cavell spoke only French and a single interpreter was able to go from French to German but none of the prisoners or the defence members were allowed to read/check the German written statements taken at the time of arrest. At the time the only person in authority to 'help' EC was the head of the neutral US Legation in Brussels (representing UK affairs) who suffered from a delicate constitution and had taken to his bed. Much hand-wringing throughout Europe but little practical help and (in hindsight) only a day in which to do it. After the very speedy execution and burial the German General who had passed the sentence was hastily 'recalled' by the Kaiser and the US Head of Legation sent back to DC for 'recuperation'. I am not a lawyer but wonder at the term traitor in this context. I'm sure one of you knows if you can be a traitor in the country in which you are working, that has been overrun by another power. So EC though English, working in Belgium for all nationalities is a traitor to the invaders . . . very complicated. Had the Geneva Convention been introduced by WWI? Perhaps I'd better look it up myself.

I don't particularly like The Daughter of Time as a detective novel, although I did enjoy reading it as I have with all of Tey's Books. I think it's an interesting exercise in research and deduction, but I don't really understand the obsession many people seem to have with the mystery of the princes in the tower. I am far more interested in the reasons why and the mechanisms though which some royals became or were made into villains or heroes by their successors or by the people after they were dead, or even by changing times, and The Daughter of Time gave me some insight into that. Examples include Richard III being painted blacker than he perhaps was for centuries and then little by little becoming to be seen as less bad or even great (depending on the historian), or Richard I being made into the heroic, almost saintly figure of Good King Richard Lionheart during his lifetime and remaining so for centuries after his death, and in modern times being seen as less good or even bad because of attitudes having changed.