Elisabeth Darby and Nicola Smith look at the impact of the death of Victoria s consort.
John Hobshouse, Lord Broughton, woke up in his quite country retreat on Monday, December 16th, 1861 to discover The Papers in mourning - The Prince Consort
died about 11 o clock on Saturday night . It was a very great shock, to Lord Broughton and to the nation as a whole. Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was only 42 and apparently had not been ill for long. Since his marriage to Queen Victoria in 1840, he had become the mainstay of his wife and family and a respected and imaginative adviser to Government, although the people had mistrusted him as a foreigner and never really warmed to him. Lord Broughton noted sadly that the Prince was an excellent man in all the relations of life - but his merits were not generally acknowledged and he returned to the book he was currently reading. This was Thomas Carlyle s
History and hiking in New Jersey are perfect together
centraljersey.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from centraljersey.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Don’t tell the folks of Grover’s Mill that Martians don’t exist.
Grover’s Mill, a section of West Windsor, was ground zero for the fictional (we hope!) Martian attack dramatized by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on a Mischief Night broadcast of Oct. 30, 1938.
Some thought a local water tower was a Martian spaceship. Alas, it was all just a radio show and a severe case of national hysteria.
Van Nest Park at 218 Cranbury Road has a short, 50 yards or so, walk with plaques commemorating the night, and a monument recognizing Grover’s Mill’s role in a very quirky chapter of American history.
in the first words of this couplet:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay
A poignant sentiment but let me acknowledge that I’m not a big Goldsmith fan. My own preferences in verse run more toward Merle Haggard, whose country music hits include the following lyric from his 1982 song “Are the Good Times Really Over?”:
Is the best of the free life behind us now
And are the good times really over for good?
I wonder, though: Is it possible that the insights of an eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish novelist-poet and a twentieth-century American singer-songwriter, each reflecting on a common theme of decadence and each served up with a dollop of nostalgia, just might intersect?
The Madness of War, American-Style
Originally posted at TomDispatch.
The American invasion of Iraq began almost 18 years ago in mid-March 2003. By early April, that country’s capital, Baghdad, had fallen and before the month ended the war was considered over and won. On May 1st, President George W. Bush, in the co-pilot’s seat of a Navy fighter jet, landed on the aircraft carrier the USS
Abraham Lincoln and gave his “mission accomplished” speech. (“Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.”) By then,
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