Oof. This is a rare DNF for me. As usual, I was having a shit time reading it, complained to my mum a few too many times and she reminded me there’s not enough time for bad books which aren’t even interesting.
I don’t have much good to say! Unfortunately. I really wanted to like this book, to learn about how people living in Stuart Britain thought about themselves/each other. In reality, the first half of the book is a set of facts told in short sentences grouped into one or two paragraphs separated by topic headings. The second half is a number of biographies of the roses of the Stuart court and their romances/sex lives. The author assures us she won’t queer anybody, since they didn’t have that back then.
Certainly, they didn’t have the words, and what to us today reads as passionate love was often just the very affectionate way friends spoke to each other, but its a spectrum and it certainly includes same-sex love!! That and having same-sex encounters in a chapter titled “Sexual Deviancy Part 1”, (without scare-quotes around deviancy!) and then following that with “Sexual Deviancy Part 2” being about bestiality and pederasty… that’s just homophobic really. I did not like it one bit.
The people of the past deserved much better than this book gave them, and I deserved to read something better too! Luckily, my next book accidentally was the perfect foil. Hooray.
It was like Horrible Histories for adults, but like if that meant taking all the funny/rude bits out of a Horrible Histories book. It would be pretty naff.
Don’t read this book. I’m sorry I did.