Past Pleasures

I had a very enjoyable lunch with Mark Wallis at the British Museum last week. His company brings history to life, it is the oldest professional costumed live interpretation company in the UK. Which means that not only do the "interpreters" wear historically accurate costumes but they also know everything that this historical character would have known. So for example Henry V111, would know all the names of his wives, his foreign policy, whose head he had cut off that week, his knowledge as a renaissance man, and even would know how to walk, talk and dance as a Royal Tudor King. So as an historian I find it fascinating, and rather like the name that the past is a pleasure.