Roy StrongCritiques

Inspiration to read: interview with Sir Roy Strong in The English Garden Sept 2014, his impetus for remaking his garden after his wife died. Made it his own, "was going about like Robespierre" and everything was recorded in pictures. And how even with all of the changes he makes, he will come across his wife in the garden still, "...she's all over that garden".

缺點：
1.沒有地圖，殊為可惜。2.有些翻譯可能有錯。

優點：
除了君王紀事，也將重要的人物、事件及時代變遷適當地呈現出來。

Fascinating book looking at some of treasures - buildings, gardens, art - lost in the four centuries between 16th and 19th centuries½

A good easily read book which deals with English National identity since the Tudor period to the present day. It looks at poetry, music and in the main, art. It looks at Turner and Constable as well as other depictions of the English rural idyll. Interesting and well written. Particularly helpful for those who have an interest in art, history and English Culture

Wonderful drawings and sketches, in black and white, with detailed notes.

If you are a lover of history or art, this book is going to enrage you. No knock on the author here: that it does outrage you is probably the point. Strong goes into a great deal of detail as to how the Reformation, the English Commonwealth, and sundry other disasters ensured that an enormous chunk of England's literary, architectural and religious heritage got destroyed. It makes for horrifying reading, laid out as skillfully as it is. And it is laid out skillfully, with an enormous wealth of illustration. A must-have for English history fans.

A history of upper class meals and the customs surrounding them, from antiquity to the present. The book almost entirely deals with Western Europe, particularly England, Italy, and France. It's a very scattershot view; there are a few tasty tidbits of knowledge, but they're so randomly chosen and so unorganized in presentation that it was hard to get a good overall picture of the subject. It's not clear what Strong's thesis or even true subject is, since sometimes he talks about formal feasts alone, while at other times he expands his view to all upper class meals, or even to dinner in general.

This is the basic gist I gleaned: feasts in Ancient Greece and Rome were men's affairs, very long and with live entertainment. As with everything else, feasts at the end of the Roman Empire had gotten really ridiculously opulent. The "barbarian hordes" that took down the Empire in the West brought in their own style of feasting, which focused on drinking. The food was no longer honey-drenched doormice stuffed with herbs, but instead simply prepared hunks of meat. In the medieval ages, nobles and the clergy often silently ate while others read to them (usually the Bible). By this time, people had discovered ancient texts and were recreating Roman tastes and obeying the idea of different foods being linked to different humors, which were in turn linked to health. By the Renaissance, the feasts got even more ridiculous (see my status updates for a few details, but suffice to say they involve models of churches made of meat and pastry, with stuffed birds standing in for a church choir, or flame bursting forth from mythical animals' mouths), and the point of the dishes was presentation, not taste. These luxurious feasts and displays continue, but with the rise of a middle class the upper class emphasized manners and taste over display in order to keep out the new rich. After WWI wasteful ostentation was cut back, and cut back further (at least in England) post WWII. And nowadays, few people eat dinner together, and host dinners at restaurants instead of within their own homes.

Great read on the destruction of some of Britain's treasures.

A series of vignettes that first appeared as columns in a British weekly, Country Life,from 1989 to 1994. Except for the essay at the beginning, they are like diary entries depicting a moment or a day at the author's home, The Laskett. A plan of the house and gardens early in the book enable the reader to get his bearings.

Pen & Watercolor Drawings from the 1600's, Content ranges from scenery, head dress, costumes
Inigo Jones was an English architect, stage designer, draughtsman

Excellent description of the coronations and their history and implications on constitutional history. Good read.

Interesting analysis of the portraits of Elizabeth I along with history tying the influences into the symbolism of her portraits.

Thorough. Historical background, detailed plans and alternatives. Easy to read and very useful if you are planning a historically accurate garden. Or if you just fancy a read about them. Everything from medieval to 20th century.

Roy Strong draws on recent scholarship by Eamon Duffy and others in this delightful introduction to the history of the English country church. There is a certain wistfulness here. Strong, as practicing churchman, accepts, in the epilogue, many of the theological and liturgical changes of the past 500 years, set in motion by the Reformation, but ultimately regrets the disruption and dislocation of medieval popular Christianity. This is most clear when he describes the alienation of the working classes from the village church ever since Reformation times.

Strong's book offers a clear and readable style along with a wealth of illustrations.

The English Miniature, by John Murdoch, Jim Murrrell, Patrick J. Noon and Roy Strong (Yale, 1981) defines the miniature more in terms of materials and technique than size. Miniatures were painted on vellum and on ivory—in the nineteenth century a technique was developed for cutting ivory from a tusk like veneer and flattening it, so that a “miniature” could be painted on a surface as large as 30 x 100 inches. Ivory superseded vellum about 1700. The origins of miniature painting lie “within the world of the atelier of the illuminators attached to the Old Tudor Royal Library” (26) where first Henry VII and then Henry VIII brought artists of the Ghent-Bruges school, starting about 1492. Lucas Hornebolt, King’s Printer from 1531, taught Hans Holbein how to paint portrait miniatures. The authors profile Nicholas Hilliard, Isaac Oliver, Peter Oliver, John Hoskins and J.H. Jr., Samuel Cooper, Thomas Flatman, and others. There are many color illustrations, but limited to the Victoria and Albert’s collections, which probably makes for some distortions.

This book by the same author as "Gloriana: the Portraits of Elizabeth I," is a collection of essays that together form an in-depth study of the myth of Gloriana. Included are detailed analyses of the "Young Man among Roses" miniature and Sir Henry Unton's memorial picture, but of particular interest are the chapters on the Accession Day festivities and on the Order of the Garter.

This excellent book, by the former Curator of the Victoria & Albert Museum and expert on sixteenth century painting analyzes the symbolism in the portraits of the Queen. Many of these portraits were made as political statements, and Strong relates the iconography of the paintings to the deliberately cultivated myth of Gloriana.

A touching book about the development of Sir Roy Strong's garden in Herefordshire. Particularly moving are the insights on the relationship with his wive.

As its title suggests, this book provides a short overview of the history of the English country parish church from its origins in the Anglo-Saxon era right up to the present day. The Church as an institution went through regular change and upheaval throughout this time, most notably in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries. Strong shows how each twist and turn left its mark on the physical fabric of the country church and on the activities that went on within its walls.

The book's title gives a hint to the personality and authority of its author, because here, in just over 300 pages, Sir Roy Strong has written one of the most fascinating tales of English village life over the centuries in which England has been "Christian". Certainly, it is about the church in the village - and compelling reading even when it constrains itself to the aesthetic and architectural developments within church design and furnishing - but it becomes gripping when it discusses the historical backdrop of events and beliefs which have moved the English.

I think that this is a great book. It may prove to be one of our best records of the church (and the Church!), and it is by no means little in its content and coverage. Sir Roy's light touch never lets the book become too solemn, even though he is making a plea for these buildings and their contents.

An excellent, readable, explanation of historical paintings in Victorian England.

Here's a well-written history of Britain told as a continuous narrative from Celtic times to the Thatcher era. Names and dates do not intrude on the real story: the changing nature of national power and the development of commerce and culture. Best of all, Strong, a reporter and broadcaster, does not neglect Britain's great cultural and scientific figures, e.g., Chaucer, Shakespeare, Indigo Jones, and Newton. The author chronicles changes in the church from Henry VIII to the present, as well as the religious practices introduced by groups like the Methodists. The lost civil war that created the United States is regarded as a necessary learning experience. The reforms engendered enabled the British to defeat the French and control 25 percent of the world's population by the 1880s. A small sample of the topics covered include the Industrial Revolution, the outlawing of slavery, and the Reform Act of 1832, which broadened Parliament's power base. Strong's Britain is a turbulent, exciting story that reader Stephen Thorne narrates with passionate enthusiasm.

What thread runs through this sweeping tapestry? For Strong, it is the gradual emergence of class distinctions over the centuries, leading to their eventual breakdown in our own times. Characters come alive in this book; great narrative is developed; kingdoms, colonies, empires emerge only to disappear, but with a semblance of order and reason.

Feast is akin to a dinner party on a Wednesday evening: it's nothing extravagant and it will not provide fodder for cocktail party conversations, but it's still better than eating at home. Strong's book analyzes the history of dining among the upper echelons of European societies from antiquity through the Edwardian period. It gives great attention to the effects of such innovations as forks and industrialization on dining trends, and maps those trends across time and regions. One drawback of this trend-following tactic is that it gives the work a disjointed feel. Strong's writing is also fairly dry and academic, which frequently led to my falling asleep. Minor criticism aside, it is a very informative book and an adept history. I would especially recommend it to anyone writing (or filming) period pieces.½

A 700-page narrative account of developments in literature, music, painting, architecture and the theatre from the Celts to the present day. The scope of the book is truly amazing. Yet it is impossible to avoid a few criticisms. First, it's really a history of the arts in England rather than Britain (Strong pleading that 'the word Britain has been used so often to mean England that its use here seems defensible'). Secondly, while ignorance means I am quite prepared co accept that the thirteenth century was 'an age of images' and to bow to his verdict on the significance of William of Wykeham as a patron, many of Strong's judgements on the modern period seemed designed co make life easy for himself. Hence Wordsworth in The Prelude was spokesman for a whole society, In Memoriam was 'the supreme representative poem of the early Victorian era' and The Waste Land is 'universally acclaimed as the central poem of the entire twentieth century'. Some of his 'entries', like the half sentence on Orwell, are so brief as to be valueless. The real worth of the book lies in the author's longer, more personal and more impassioned appreciations, as of Lord Clark. To explain the 'relevance' of such a book may appear otiose, but Strong is clear that, at a time of globalisation and ever-increasing speed, we in this country need a rock to cling to: 'That should be provided by a mutual celebration regardless of class, colour or creed, of the island's achievements in the arts and of those aspects of them which have set us apart.'

The final section of the book is wonderful: a lament for what has been lost in the face of populism, mass culture, and dumbing down. The reader cannot fail to be unmoved by the loss of high cultural values and a sense of cultural history and continuity in the new populist, uneducated, Britain.

An excellent treatment of the political uses of masques at court.

Earlier edition published under title “Splendour at Court;” has been substantially revised.