Bristol gives out Reds, the university of London gives out Purples, and of course my Alma Mater gives out Pinks,(but they’re much harder to get). Wiki is quite helpful.
As a child I never understood why my dad was so fond of his stupid pink scarf (which is now more of a sort of Guinness colour).
Or at least pretend ones do, since we have no indication that they actually exist in PTerry’s world except in the movies.
For some reason I mixed up the trolls and the parts they were playing. My bad.
And now I get that joke. Thanks!
Pratchett mentions the cleanliness of the river’s water in one of his books, and says, “it should be clean, considering all the kidneys it has passed through.”
I always thought it was pretty much a London thing- especially with regards to Nightwatch;
There’s the battle of Cable Street which actually happened just before WWII, something to do with Oswald Mosley and his facist supporters being beaten up by local residents when they were trying to have a march (I don’t think it was quite as the mythology puts it though).
Vimes mentions police officers being called ‘Sammies’ = ‘Bobbies’ nicknamed after the founder of the first London police force, Sir Robert Peel.
Vimes great grandfather (I think) - the one who killed the king, has always carried shades of Oliver Cromwell to me, he tried to create a future without monarchy- but it just ended up not working.
Theres also a lot of other stuff that I can’t remember off the top of my head- someone needs to re-start the discworld reading club so we can discuss this stuff, especially Nightwatch which is my favourite book of the series.
I think the same ref.Vimes I also think Carrot is based on King Arthur (before he was famous) and the Patrician is definitley Machievelli.
The Night Watch (now the painting has been cleaned it turns out it was the Day Watch all along in round world)was Dutch and I go with the poster who saw a similarity between the twin cities of Bude and Pesht(Budapest)and Ankh Morpork.
No – Machiavelli, in his personal political career, was a failure. After he was purged from the government of Florence, he wrote The Prince – which historians believe was intended at least in part as a book-length resume to get him a job advising some prince, preferably Machiavelli’s idol, Cesar Borgia. But it never did get him a job. Vetinari is not Machiavelli, he is Machiavelli’s ideal of a prince. (Except that Vetinari never seems to do some things Machiavelli regarded as essential to a complete prince, such as hunting, or leading troops in battle.)
I haven’t read them all either, but I think I’m about 50-60% through them. Get thee to a public library and read more! (No, seriously; every public library system I’ve been a member of has at least a handful of Pratchett books hiding and constantly checked out. Hold requests are your friend.)
Ankh-Morpork is obviously based on a number of different cities, London, New York, and others included as details are added. Little snippets of reality from different time periods for each, though, and as Terry Pratchett has gone along in the novels, his original description of A-M being walkable in about thirty minutes’ time has been stretched to a near impossibility. (Well, I guess you could do it if you had enormous legs, walked quickly, and everything was squished together so that only rail-thin people could exist in A-M… but that’s unlikely.) I don’t really qualify A-M in terms of the cities that inspired its creation and description, but generally think of it as a representation of a lot of “great Western cosmopolitan cities” from different areas and time periods all rolled together.
Whoops ,I’ll just get my brain into gear ,I actually meant Cesare Borgia but obviously the Patrician is not quite so overtly violent as he was.
My only weak defence apart from being brain dead is that Cesare was Machievellian in character.