Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Welcome to our first link party of 2018! Last week, I compared and contrasted the films Dunkirk and Their Finest. Sim shared an interview with the actors from Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, inspiring me to put that film plus some Gloria Grahame films on my to-watch list. Tina reviewed the classic British mystery, 39 Steps by John Buchan.

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I just watched the second season of the Netflix series, The Crown, and enjoyed it even more than the first.

Like I mentioned in my post about the first season, this is proving very useful for learning history from the fifties and sixties — events too recent to appear in my history books but too early to be part of my remembered experience. I knew there was conflict over the Suez Canal, but didn’t know the parties involved. I loved seeing the re-creation of the Queen’s first televised Christmas broadcast, during the Christmas season. One historical event that I did know about was the assassination of John F. Kennedy — that episode was very moving.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this series pulled me in so much. Oddly, I really think it’s because I relate to Queen Elizabeth. Even more odd, it’s because I relate to how awkward life is for her. On the surface, one would think that an advantage to being Queen is that everything is arranged so that life isn’t awkward. But, as it turned out, being a monarch in the mid-twentieth century when monarchies are decidedly passé can be very awkward indeed.

Have you watched The Crown? What do you think?