Not a very literary story, but there are few things as silly as the continued existence of monarchies -- with the bloated British House of Windsor at the top of the list of disposable entities -- and so when Hilary Mantel attacks 'bland, plastic, machine-made' Duchess of Cambridge, as Adam Sherwin reports in The Independent, I'm happy to spread the word.
As Mantel notes:
As Mantel notes:
Female Royals are "persons but they are supra-personal, carriers of a blood line: at the most basic, they are breeding stock, collections of organs."And one has to appreciate this comparison:
The author compared the Royals to pandas. "Our current royal family doesn't have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment.I am all for releasing them into the wild, de-titled and de-loused .....
"But aren't they interesting ? Aren't they nice to look at ? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it's still a cage."