Join Duchess Katie & Lady Sadie as they dive into the world of historical BDSM

1. For those of us that we raised in a school system that doesn’t talk about colonialism… I know it is shocking but in 1910 Great Britain owned Egypt. By 1922 Egypt will be an independent nation.

1. 1910 is a wild time in the world anyways. There is a lot of colonialism in this book - I mean the cast are all expats or colonizers themselves. There is a lot of the energy that will lead to the xenophobia and nationalism that is the cause of the first world war. This doesn’t directly deal with any of that but it is the backdrop.

2. I went down a rabbit hole on salons in Cairo:

1. HIGHPOINTS: A Palestinian immigrant named May Elias Ziade hosted a wildly popular Salon and corresponded with the brilliant poet Kahlil Gibran.
2. I also learned that the first literary salon was in the Arab world to a ruler named Suayna Bint Husayn and it is highly likely that it then hit seventeenth century europe.
3. There were a lot of salons in Cairo - and one that was hosted by a woman named May Elias Ziade, She was originally from Palestine to a Born in Palestine to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother. Ziadeh attended school in her native city and in Lebanon, before immigrating along with her family to Egypt in 1908. She started publishing her works in French (under the pen name Isis Copia) in 1911, and Kahlil Gibran entered into a correspondence with her in 1912. Being a prolific writer, she wrote for Arabic-language newspapers and periodicals, along with publishing poems and books.
4. The history of the literary salon in the Arab world, of which little is known, dates back far longer than one would expect. Sukayna bint Husayn (735 / 743), began running her salon centuries during the Umayyad dynasty, well before the idea was first introduced to seventeenth century Europe.She was a highly regarded woman of great intelligence, and an expert in fashion and literature. She was the first woman to open her house to male and female guests, and organised evenings of music, literary criticism, and poetry

3. ONE LAST THING: so i adore old planes and my dad was in a flying circus back in the day but I just had to mention that Bleriot was a real inventor/ aviator and was the first to fly over the English Channel and (almost) land. He did survive his many many crashes and went on to design more planes. He also worked closely with Voison which is the designer for the very real human that shows up - Raymonde de Laroche. Who will actually die in her own tragic crash just nine years after this book

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Intro Music: Musopen; Violin Concerto in F major, RV 293 'Autumn' - III. Allegro https://musopen.org/music/14910-the-four-seasons-op-8/