Everything is a lie.

I'm bingeing on anti-monarchism, at least on critical histories of monarchy. This one's pretty famous - a collection of essays by popular historians (including poor old Hugh Trevor-Roper who was about to become a laughing stock for authenticating the Hitler diaries when this book came out in 1983). It's about the careful production, by monarchs and law-makers and bureaucrats, over a busy period of about 100 years, of the traditions, protocols and modes of thought that govern the Crown-constitutional status quo of the present day.

The two best-known essays in the book are the long introduction by Eric Hobsbawm and the central essay 'The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual : The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’ c. 1820–19771' by David Cannadine (him off the radio). Hobsbawm's essay is a brilliant and wide-ranging survey of the response of monarchy to revolution and social change across Europe, across the modern world. The long, multi-clause sentences, the impatience with shallow thinking, the idiosyncracy. A great read.

The best essay, though, is the Cannadine. I'm not a historian (seriously, I'm definitely not a historian) but this is top history - the depth of research, the imaginative reading of papers and contemporary accounts, the against-the-grain interpretation of conventional wisdom. The effect of the essay is not to topple the monarchy or to make it seem absurd - this is not a republican polemic - but to make it an integral, deliberate part of the mechanism of state, to remove the mystique about the ritual that sustains it, to clarify the origins and purpose of the traditions we now observe as somehow eternal.

The core of the essay is that essentially all of the traditions that sustain the contemporary Crown-Parliamentary system (what Tom Nairn calls 'Ukania') were invented during a critical 50 year period beginning with Queen Victoria's return to public life in the 1870s and then further refined during the critical mid-20th century period that saw an abdication, a catastrophic world war, the end of empire and the final removal of half a dozen ancient European monarchies - a period that might so easily have seen the end of the monarchy in Britain too.

Clever functionaries saw the urgency of the situation for royalty in the 1870s and returned to the history books to find useful rituals from the mediaeval or Tudor/Stuart periods and recreated them for the modern period - the state opening of Parliament, coronations, royal weddings, funerals and state visits - all were invented or elaborated in that period.

An excellent example is the whole idea of the investiture, unheard-of for centuries but revivived for the crowning of Edward VII's son as Prince of Wales in 1911 (and then updated further for Prince Charles in 1969. amidst a wave of nationalist militancy, bombings etc.). A gloriously silly, cod-Welsh, pretend-ancient ritual that fooled almost everyone, gave the role of the Prince of Wales some historic heft and contributed to the project of turning a remote, London-centric monarchy into a popular, multi-national affair.

The stories in Cannadine's essay about the awful, half-baked ritual of the period before the modernisation are worth the read on their own - the terrible, ill-prepared choral singing; the drunken fighting at royal dinners; the chaotic processions; the casual assortment of worn-out uniforms, surplices and robes; the insolent, noisy congregations at funerals and the routine heckling and abuse from the hoi poloi in the streets.

One of the things that we're enjoying about the present royal palaver (I'm writing this between the death and funeral of HRH Queen Elizabeth II, as the queue becomes a tourist attraction in its own right) is the glimpses we get of the arbitrary and the contingent in the highly-ordered ritual of death and succession. The moment when Prince Charles impatiently ordered a pen-holder to be moved when signing one of his many proclamations reminded us that no one has done this for over 70 years so the poor sod who put it there probably just guessed where it should go.

The weird combination of red carpet event and solemn moment for the ages that's been concocted for the coffin's tour of the provinces and the lying in state is high-grade constitutional show business. The knife-edge awkwardness surrounding the involvement of Prince Andrew in the proceedings, the tricky symbolism of the fact that two of the Princes present may not wear their military uniform, may not even salute - although both served while others present did not. Whether this complicated and troubled institution can sustain another turn of the royal merry-go-round, supervised by the Queen's apparently less compliant and more opinionated successor, remains to be seen. It's going to be interesting.

Çok değerli olmasının yanında aşırı detaya giren bir çalışma. Normal biri için ilk ve son bölümleri vermek istediği mesajı veriyor diğer kısımlar bu mesaj üzerine detaylar. galli kadınlarının geleneksel kıyafetinin nereden geldiğini öğrenmek herkesin ilgileneceğini sanmıyorum

Eric Hobsbawm's books appear to be very well thought of.

Witness History did a good episode on him.
He was a child in Berlin in/till 1933.

Don't know which books would be best for me to read.