Let’s get one thing straight about my feelings around Alexander Cole.
It’s nothing personal.
I’m sure he’s a very nice bloke deep down. At least I hope so.
He’s me.
the irritating Alexander Cole
But boy, he drives me nuts. Because I don’t want to be him. I was basically forced into being Alexander Cole.
Why? Continue reading
Dan Brown sold a couple of books about ten years ago based on the conspiracy theories of three men called Lincoln, Baigent and Leigh. They had done some research around a mysterious church in Rennes le Chateau in the Languedoc region of southern France.
The book touched on one of the great atrocities of the medieval age, though it still remains obscure to many - the Albigensian Crusade. Here’s 13 things you may not know about this turbulent period in our history.
The history books will say nine but the history books are wrong. There were ten. Pope Innocent called a Crusade against the people of southern France in 1209. The Crusade was designed to obliterate another Christian religion - and it succeeded utterly. It was known as the Albigensian Crusade of 1209–1229. Continue reading
He was hospitalized more than thirty times in his life. He had suffered from colitis since his late teens as well as a duodenal ulcer, Addison’s disease, frequent UTI’s, and hyperthyroidism. His medical records were largely kept hidden from the American public.
He almost died from scarlet fever when he was 3 and received the last rites no less than four times in his life.
The first occasion was on the ocean liner ‘Queen Mary’ in 1947 after becoming gravely ill in England; in 1951 while stricken with a high fever in Japan; and in 1954 after a urinary tract infection following spinal surgery.
The last time, of course, was on November 22 1963, in Dallas.
He could have avoided combat legitimately but chose not to. At the start of World War Two he tried to enlist but the Army disqualified him on medical grounds because of his intestinal and back problems. He used his father’s considerable connections to get accepted.
When the PT-109 that he was commanding was sunk by a Japanese destroyer, he towed a badly burned crewman through the water with a life jacket strap clenched between his teeth. He later received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for extreme heroism.
After the sinking he and his crew were stranded on an island. He carved a message onto the husk of a coconut shell and gave it to two natives to deliver to the PT base at Rendova so he and his men could be rescued. He later had it encased in wood and plastic and used it as a paperweight in the Oval Office. It is now in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
His older brother Joe Junior was supposed to carry the family’s standard into the political arena but he was killed while serving the USAF during World War Two.
It was awarded in 1957 for his second book “Profiles in Courage,” although there is considerable debate about how much was written by his aide Theodore Sorensen.
In fact, Kennedy was the richest man ever to take the oath of office and gave his entire $100,000-a-year White House salary to charity.
No, Nixon wasn’t the first to do it.
Kennedy installed a secret taping system in the Oval office before Nixon did.
It recorded many historical discussions between JFK and his staff, including conversations during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In September 1963, alarmed at the cost of NASA’s space program, he proposed partnering the Soviet Union on a joint expedition to the moon.
He escalated the Vietnam conflict even though he thought America could not win. In April,1963 he said, supposedly off the record: “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our butts out of there.” But he went ahead anyway, rather than risk electoral backlash.
Judith Exner was sleeping with the Illinois godfather and the President of the United States at the same time.
Sleeping with Monroe upset his wife. Sleeping with Exner severely compromised his government.
On November 22, it kept him erect after the first bullet went through his neck so that he was unable to fall forwards. This would have prevented a second and fatal bullet from hitting him in the head.
Just a month after he was elected President a retired postal worker named Richard Pavlick followed the president-elect from Hyannis Port to Palm Beach. His car was loaded with dynamite and he intended to ram the president’s vehicle and blow it up. He was foiled by a routine traffic stop.
Two more assassination plots were uncovered, one in Chicago on the 2nd November 1963 and another in Tampa four days before Dallas.
Jackie Kennedy asked the Scottish Black Watch pipers to march in front of his funeral cortege. Some had cuts and bruises from a bar brawl in Kentucky where they had defended Jack’s name and reputation on the night of the assassination.
Having read through the list perhaps you came to the same conclusion that I did; beyond the gloss lay a man full of contradictions.
He may have been a legend. He was also very human …
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Only it wasn’t like that.
It was nothing like Camelot and Jack had more enemies than any President of the 20th century.
There had already been two assassination attempts that November, one in Chicago on the second, (Kennedy cancelled his trip), and one on November 18 in Tampa. That one the Mob called off.
If you were a novelist, writing this scenario - and remember, novelists must rely on logic if they don’t want to infuriate the reader - then there is only one plausible explanation for the events of November 22.
He was the most aggressive Attorney General the United States has ever had.
He was waging a relentless war against the Mafia. He was about to deport one of the big bosses - Carlos Marcello. He also had a Get Hoffa squad targeting union boss Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa’s Teamster Union fund was the Mafia’s private bank.
If they were to survive, they had to act.
But how were the Mafia so well protected in the aftermath? Weren’t they a world away from the White House?
Not really. Not even hardly.
Kennedy shared a mistress with Sam Giancana, the Chicago mob boss, who was himself a close associate of men like John Roselli and Carlos Marcello.
Jack also owed Sam the Presidency - in the narrow election win over Nixon, ‘Momo’ got Kennedy over the line by delivering key votes in Chicago.
But wouldn’t you need heavy influence inside Washington to kill a President?
They had plenty of influence, thanks to Jack and Bobby. The Kennedys wanted Castro dead and they had asked the CIA to do it. Mission impossible.
So the spooks asked the Mob for help, as they had done many times in the past.
After all, who had all the anti-Castro contacts in Cuba?
The Mob. They practically ran Cuba before Castro took over.
So by 1963 the Agency and Team Soprano were very cosy with each other indeed and they both had common cause; they both hated Jack for the Bay of Pigs.
But would the Mob kill a President? Well of course they would. Hollywood said it best:
Did it work? Did it stop Bobby in his tracks and get him out of Washington ?
Look it up.
And someone got to Bobby in the end, too. Another lunatic, of course, another gunman acting alone. Bobby had just won the California primaries and looked to be heading to the White House.
You can imagine what they thought of that scenario in certain Italian restaurants.
Sirhan’s attorney happened to be Grant Cooper; one of his clients was … oh, John Roselli.
Sirhan has since claimed he remembers nothing of what happened that night.
Eerily, his claims bear an astounding similarity to the plot of a movie called The Manchurian Candidate.
The star of the movie? Frank Sinatra.
Sinatra was Kennedy’s go-to guy when the Kennedy’s wanted that little favor just before the 1960 election.
Because he was a very close friend of someone they needed.
Sam Giancana.
Really, if you were a novelist you couldn’t make it up. And why would you? Someone thought it all out for you fifty years ago.
It’s all fiction, of course. Nothing like that could ever really happen. Not in the Free World. Not in the United States.
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The Valley of Death complete with cannonballs, Crimea 1855
Before modern war journalism, accounts were written at the end of a conflict, such as Thucydides account of the Peloponnesian Wars.
Dutch painter Willem van de Velde is credited with being the first modern war correspondent; in 1653 he used a small boat to row out from land and watch a naval battle between the Dutch and the English at close hand.
When newspapers became established, one Henry Crabb Robinson covered Napoleon’s European campaigns for the London Times.
One of history’s most famous photographers, Robert Capa, once said:
In fact he barely got a moment’s rest. In the thirties and forties he covered the Spanish Civil War, the second Sino-Japanese war, World War Two, the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and then the first Indochina war - in which he was killed.
Modern war correspondents aim to bring graphic images and reports of wars from around the globe right into our living rooms to show us what it’s really like.
And the last I heard there were no rumors of peace. The modern war correspondent’s job still appears recession proof.
1.‘I have made arrangements for the correspondents to take the field .. . and I have suggested to them that they should wear a white uniform to indicate the purity of their character.’
- attributed to Union General Irvin McDowell during the American Civil War.
aftermath of Antietam
2. ‘By showing war in its stinking reality, we have taken away the glory and shown that negotiation is the only way to solve international problems.’
- Howard Smith, ABC news presenter
3. ‘Take the glamor out of war? I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that? … Can you take the glamor out of a Cobra, or getting stoned at China Beach? … War is good for you, you can’t take the glamor out of that. It’s like trying to take the glamor out of sex, trying to take the glamor out of the Rolling Stones!’
- Tim Page, combat photographer, Vietnam War, in his autobiography Page by Page
4. ‘If you have not seen a battle, your education has been somewhat neglected. For after all, war has been one of the primary functions of mankind, and unless you see men fight you miss something fundamental.’
- Herbert Matthews
5. ‘I just figured what with guns going off and things blowing up, there’d be plenty of deep truths and penetrating insights.’
- P.J. O’Rourke, Holidays in Hell
6. ‘When one’s nation is at war, reporting becomes an extension of the war effort.’
- Max Hastings
7. ‘I wouldn’t tell the people anything until the war was over - and then I’d tell them who won.’
- military censor at a meeting in Washington
8. ‘You see these things, these terrible things. But in an odd way they’re good stories.’
- Charles Mohr
9. ‘War is the ambulance chaser’s wet dream … the visions of misery and suffering can also provide a convenient reference point for putting aside one’s own damaged emotions.’
- Paul Harris. ‘Someone Else’s War.’
10. ‘Perhaps everyone who reports on war is in part sating their own dark curiosities. I know I will return soon.’
- Askold Krushelnycky, war correspondent
11. ‘Most wars literally, not merely photographically, go through people’s living rooms.’
- Charles Mohr, war correspondent
12. ‘Nothing makes an easier lead sentence than a stray mortar round hitting a starving baby in a typhus hospital.’
- P. J. O’Rourke, Holidays in Hell
Leningrad 1941
13. ‘Working as a war correspondent is almost the only classic male endeavor left that provides physical danger and personal risk without public disapproval and the awful truth is that for correspondents war is not hell. It is fun.’
- Nora Ephron
14. ‘It is not the bullet with my name on that worries me. It’s the one that says: “To whom it may concern.’”
- resident of Belfast
15. ‘The brave ones shot bullets; the crazy ones shot film.’
– quote from ‘Joseph Longo, founder of the International Combat Camera Association’
16. ‘Despite all the videos you see from the Ministry of Defence or the Pentagon, and all the sanitized language describing smart bombs and pinpoint strikes, the scene on the ground has remained remarkably the same for hundreds of years. Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers children. Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice. We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story.’
- Marie Colvin. Killed in Homs Syria February 2012 while reporting on the Syrian conflict.
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The iconic image of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara is one of the world’s most objectified images, found on an endless array of t-shirts, posters, tattoos, and even bikinis.
He is a superhero of the consumer culture he despised and a universal symbol of rebellion.
According to leftist mythology he was a brave, noble soldier who loved freedom and sacrificed his life for the socialist cause and he yet remains a national hero in Cuba, where his face is on the 3 peso coin and school children begin each morning pledging: ‘We will be like Che.’
When I pre-released the cover of my latest novel, NAKED IN HAVANA, with the tagline ‘Sex, Lies and Che Guevara’ someone commented that they wouldn’t buy anything that had Che in it. Extreme? Decide for yourself.
Here are some things you perhaps didn’t know.
The La Cabaña Fortress is a popular tourist destination dominating Havana Bay. It was once the final destination for many of Castro’s enemies and it was here that Che ordered the executions of hundreds of Batista loyalists, a job for which he was uniquely suited:
“To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.”
In his defence, Batista loyalists weren’t renowned for being warm and fuzzy either.
Che oversaw the establishment of Cuba’s first gulag at Guanahacabibes. The forced labor camp was used to detain homosexuals and devout Catholics as well as dissidents.
On October 8, 1967, U.S.-trained Bolivian rangers captured Che in a ravine near the Bolivian town of La Higuera.
The next day he was summarily executed in a local schoolhouse and his body was moved to nearby Vallegrande and put on show for the press inside a laundry room. That room has now become a pilgrimage site and is featured along the tourist ‘Che Guevara Trail.’
Locals in the town now pray to “Saint Ernesto,” although his sainthood is unofficial. As he was a sworn Marxist don’t expect any move for canonization from the Vatican anytime soon.
His body and belongings were treated with little respect by his killers.
His famous pipe was taken by the man who shot him and the CIA agent who interrogated him, Felix Rodriguez, took the tobacco.
His not-very-Marxist Rolex also disappeared.
Another agent, Gustavo Villoldo, snipped a lock of hair and auctioned it 40 years later - for $100,000.
The Bolivian army never revealed what happened to Guevara’s body but his hands were amputated and preserved in formaldehyde. They were then sent to Buenos Aires for fingerprint identification so that Castro could never claim they shot the wrong man.
What happened to them after that? No one is able to point the finger to where they are now.
The order to kill Che came from Bolivian President René Barrientos and was carried out by Captain Gary Prado, from an army division under the command of General Joaquin Zentano.
2 years later Barrientos died in a helicopter crash; Zentano was assassinated in Paris in 1975. In 1991 a gun accident left Prado a paraplegic.
Does that mean they were cursed? It could just be the law of averages. Bolivian presidents and colonels don’t often die in their beds.
When he was captured, Che Guevara reportedly shouted: “Don’t shoot! I am Che Guevara and I am worth more alive than dead!”
A gazillion t-shirt sales say you were wrong there, Che.
Photographer Alberto Korda took THAT famous photograph at a memorial service for te victims of the La Coubre explosion in Havana on March 5, 1960.
Copies were later acquired by a wealthy Italian businessman, Giangiacomo Fetrinelli. After Che died his image acquired a life of its own.
A lifelong communist, Korda did not claim moral rights until 2000 when Smirnoff used the image in a vodka commercial. He was awarded $50,000, which he donated to the Cuban healthcare system.
Che was actually Ernie. His family was half Irish and he was descended from one Paddy Lynch from Galway, on his mother’s side.
He was born in Rosario in Argentina to wealthy parents and never became a Cuban citizen, despite his intense involvement in that country’s destiny.
He got the nickname (“Chancho”) as a youth because of his poor hygiene.
He may look good on a t-shirt but apparently he didn’t change his own more than once a week.
People stopped calling him Chancho when he acquired powers of summary execution.
As a youth he played in chess tournaments and liked to recite poetry. His favorite subjects were mathematics and engineering.
He had a daughter with his first wife, Hilda Gadea, born in Mexico City on February 15, 1956.
He also had four children with his second wife, the revolutionary Aleida March - Aleida, Camilo, Celia, and Ernesto.
He and Fidel Castro competed with a certain well known writer in what was known as The Hemingway Fishing Contest.
The Angry Young Man and the Sea.
Last year a right wing author named Humberto Fontova claimed to have uncovered evidence that Guevara was involved in a November 1962 plot to use 1,200 pounds of TNT to blow up Macy’s, Gimbels, Bloomingdale’s, and Grand Central Station the day after Thanksgiving.
As this is the busiest shopping day of the year the resulting carnage may have eclipsed 9/11.
As John Lennon would have said: You say you want a revolution?
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But you could perhaps blame William the Conqueror. When he took the English throne in 1066 he retained possession of the Duchy of Normandy in France.
Under feudal law, this meant that he and all future English kings owed homage to the king of France for their lands on the other side of the Channel.
Really? The situation was always going to be a stone in the shoe of both monarchs.
Two hundred and fifty years later, Isabella’s marriage to Edward II of England was an effort to resolve the problem.
Born in 1295, Isabella was the only surviving daughter of the wonderfully named Philippe the Handsome of France. At 3 years old she was already proposed as the bride for the King of England’s eldest son, Edward, to smooth negotiations for the Anglo-French truce of 1299.
Phillipe was not just a pretty face; he was thinking ahead. His own dynasty was secure - after all he had three healthy sons.
And if his daughter married England’s son, then his grandson would be King of England one day.
Edward was ten years older than his bride when they married. He was the youngest of fifteen children and his mother had died when he was 6. He had endured a miserable childhood and his father, the formidable Longshanks, took little interest in him.
But with exquisite irony, Edward was the only son to survive.
He lived in his father’s shadow then and always would, for despite his strapping good looks he just wasn’t king material. In fact he has been described by some historians as one of the most unsuccessful kings ever to rule England.
In 1325 she left England to conduct delicate negotiations with France over Gascony. She returned with a mercenary army and threw him off the throne.
By then her father was dead and two of her brothers soon after him.
Some blamed the curse laid at her father’s door by Templar Grand Master Jaques Molay when Phillip burned him alive outside Notre Dame cathedral.
When her other brother Charles died as well in 1328 there was no clear successor to the throne of France. All three had died without a male heir.
Well done, Jacques.
Isabella transferred her claim to the French throne to her eldest son, Edward, and actively encouraged him to pursue it, as the closest living male relative of the late King Charles and the only surviving male descendant of the senior line of her father’s Capetian dynasty.
Yes, well - the French didn’t quite see things this way. Under French Salic law, males descended through the female line were disqualified from the succession.
Besides, the French didn’t want an English king. So they crowned the dead king’s cousin, Charles of Valois, as their new monarch.
Though Isabella’s reign as regent of England was short - her son removed her and executed her lover when he was just eighteen - she continued to have great influence at court and kept up a healthy correspondence with all of Europe’s leading figures.
She persuaded Edward to pursue his claims with full vigour. In 1337 Edward refused to pay homage to the French king for his lands in Aquitaine - so the French confiscated them.
The dispute led to the Hundred Years War, (although the name is actually a later invention of historians; it was actually three separate wars divided by periods of truce.)
From it grew the legends of Joan of Arc, Agincourt and the Black Prince.
The war had consequences Isabella could not have foreseen for her beloved France. The country was devastated - it lost half its population. It also brought about the fall of the French tongue in England, which had served as the language of the nobility and trade from the time of the Norman conquest.
It was inevitable really, from that day in 1066 when Harold caught the arrow in his eye.
Or was it the Templar curse laid by Jacques de Molay?
The tangled webs we weave; it is ironic that the woman who so prided herself on being a daughter of France should bear the son that started the war that brought her country to its knees.
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That’s right. It says so on the cover.
Well, she was brave. She might have been a she-wolf as well, people are never black or white.
Because I call her Braveheart does not mean I am taking her side. I did choose to tell the story from her point of view.
Giving her point of view doesn’t mean I’m taking her part. Besides, her degree of her complicity has never been proved. There were even rumors that he didn’t die at all. But even if she was complicit, she wasn’t murderous when she first came to England.
She has a compelling story to tell. I tried to tell it.
No, I think she believed she was justified. She was far more complex than people thought.
I think she was underestimated by her contemporaries because she was a woman. What people saw was not necessarily what they got. In fact it certainly wasn’t - look what happened later.
When she invaded England she was living in exile in France, her brother Charles, the King of France, had washed his hands of her and she had just five hundred men and her wits to turn the tide against her.
No matter what you think of her, it was a remarkable thing to do.
I don’t presume to know.
I’m speculating on the facts, trying to understand why she and Edward and everyone around them acted as they did. It may or may not be true.
Historians deal in facts and only facts. Historical novelists try to learn the facts and then imagine what might have happened in the background.
We know Edward was defeated at Bannockburn in 1314. That’s a fact. You can’t tamper with that.
But other things are not certain. We don’t know, for instance, if he had a physical relationship with Hugh Despenser. If not, what other reason might he have had for raising him so high above everyone else? It’s an intriguing question and one I chose to speculate on.
Well, we see the story through her eyes.
But it’s a much more complex story than that.
For instance, Edward was a very bad king but then good kings can also be very bad people. It’s your judgment not mine.
If there’s anyone who’s unsympathetic it’s probably Hugh Despenser. But then in this storyline we don’t have the chance to get to know him, we just know what he does.
But all that came later. My purpose was to look at a moment in history before that, what led to it. There are no cartoon villains here. Despenser was ruthless but he didn’t drive the plot, he was an effect of it.
Did Edward allow himself to be manipulated again by his lover - or could there have been another, more interesting, reason?
The villain anyway is the world Edward and Isabella were born into - they are both victims of it and it is never going to let them go unless they find a way out - and when you’re king and queen of England getting out poses a big problem.
You’d like that, wouldn’t you? No, he wasn’t. But you can understand how the story came about. Look, everyone has their own opinion about history, and for most people it’s set in stone. Fair enough.
But Bernard Cornwell said in a recent interview: “If you are wanting to write historical fiction I always say, you are not an historian. If you want to tell the world about the Henrician reformation, then write a history book - but if you want an exciting story, then become a storyteller. Telling the story is the key.”
I’ve tried to tell her story as well as keep to the facts. It’s what novelists do.
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This is a farce. I am the king, I am answerable to no one.
I would say give me your sword, and you would see how effeminate I am.
I’ll fillet you clean and stick your head on a post for the birds.
Does she say there was three of us in it at once? She would say anything if it suited her purpose, that woman. Like this drivel here.
She was 12 years old when I married her!
Did she think I would ravish her that first night? What sort of animal do you think I am?
Besides it was a marriage made for political reasons, her father’s and mine. She knew that.
We had four children. What does that tell you?
And you still think me effeminate?
I would say four bull’s eyes from four arrows is damn good archery in any time and place.
Can you boast the same?
Of course I did. What’s wrong with that?
If Piers had been a woman would anyone have sneered behind my back, would that have coloured their opinion?
If he were my mistress they would have laughed and clapped me on the back and made up bawdy rhymes praising my manhood.
Sleep with one man and they say you are a bad king. Sleep with a hundred women you are Henry the Eighth.
No, I never loved her, not in that way, but what men do love their wives? That is not the purpose of marriage, it wasn’t in my day anyway.
But I was fond of her. I took care of her in every way. She had nothing to complain of.
But she did, didn’t she, by God!
I ruled by the divine right of kings! I am answerable to God for what I do, no one else!
I did not need my barons’ permission to make him Duke of Cornwall or do anything else I wished. God made me their king!
They were impudent and they paid for it, every one of them. Bastards.
Is that what I am accused of here, of not being as great a warrior as Longshanks, that old curmudgeon? ‘
Well he never liked me and I hope he is spinning in his grave like a top.
Anyway, I never wanted to be King of England. I had no choice in the matter.
If the barons -Lancaster and Warwick and the rest - if they had sent troops to support me I might have prevailed.
Instead they sat at home and sulked and let me do their fighting for them and when luck deserted me they blamed for it.
I wonder, did luck desert me - or was it them that did the deserting?
I had my reasons for Despenser. They are in the book.
You can believe them or disbelieve them as you please.
But surely you can’t think I was in love with him? He was hardly a man of Piers mettle, was he?
If it was a woman, you would have understood it. History would have made it into one of the great love stories.
Instead I have been pilloried like this!
I have had enough. You have all badgered me all my life, in death you will surely let me be. Talk about me in my absence all you want. I shall answer no more of your questions.
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You are Isabella Capet, daughter of Phillip Capet, King of France, and queen consort of Edward II of England.
I am.
You are charged by History with deposing the lawful king of England and then having him murdered. What do you say to that?
I did depose him but I did it for the good of all England. Not a man stood against me when I arrived on the shores at Harwich, what does that tell you?
As to Edward’s murder, I would say: bring me the proof. Others did that, I had no part in it.
We offered him retirement, the same concession I was offered when my time came. I lived to a ripe age, I thought he should too.
You knew that couldn’t happen! He was a focal point for rebellion.
If he was a man others would rally behind how was it that I walked in to England with barely five hundred men and marched to London without meeting resistance?
Besides who should they rebel against? I was regent for my son, who was rightful heir to the throne. You’re wasting my time here.
You had an affair with another man while you were still married to the King of England. This man was ruthless and ambitious and he used you to gain power for himself. You allowed it to happen!
There were others?
Don’t be impudent.
Answer the question.
If he used me, or I used him, it did neither of us any good in the end, did it?
I was born to be a queen also, not to be shut up like a nun and play no part in affairs.
Was it your pride that was hurt then? … Madam?
How would you have felt then, in my situation? How much humiliation was I supposed to stand?
He taught me to obey him.
And what about your son? How did he feel when he discovered what you did to his father?
What about what his father did to his mother?
Which was what?
A woman was not born to be so neglected by her husband. I had a right to his company and …must I say it? To physical comforts. Am I not supposed to say this, because I am of a different time, because I was a queen?
He embittered me. He also underestimated me, didn’t he?
Imagine what we might have been, if he had not been so weak. If he had been … a real man.
Isabella, did you ever love your husband?
How dare you ask me that. They buried me in my wedding gown at my express wish. The casket I carried with me to my grave had in it Edward’s heart. Does not tell you something?
It tells me you made your point. My case rests.
Thank you, sir. Now let me.
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ISABELLA, Braveheart of France, available now from Amazon US and Amazon UK
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