New Year's Day

The United Kingdom and the British Isles

Great britain and the british isles from Ana Arias Castro

Monarchs descended from Quen Victoria

Many present-day monarchs in Europe are descended from Queen Victoria. Have a look at the family trees:
CURRENT MONARCHS IN EUROPE AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH QUEEN VICTORIA:

QUEEN VICTORIA'S CHILDREN:

Charts from Wikipedia

England, the United Kingdom and Great Britain

The British Royal family

Queen Wlizabeth II -  Wikipedia

Members-BBC website
How much do you know about the British Royal Family
Interesting fact about the British Royal Family

Who was William Shakespeare?

William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) – 23 April 1616) was an English author who wrote 37 plays and also 2 very long poems in his lifetime. He lived in Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire, England. His plays are still performed today. He is often quoted in modern writing.
By 1594 he was an actor in The Chamberlain's Men acting company.

His plays are of different kinds, or genres. There are histories, tragedies and comedies. These plays are among the best known in English literature and are studied in schools around the world. Shakespeare wrote his works between about 1590 and 1613.

Shakespeare has been credited for adding new words and phrases to the English language and for making some words more popular. He created over 1,700 English words.
File:William Shakespeare in a nutshell.webmPlay media
William Shakespeare in a nutshell

Life
He married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years older than he was. He had three children, Susanna (married John Hall), Hamnet Shakespeare (died at the age of 11 due to unknown reasons) and Judith (married Thomas Quiney). By 1592 he had become an actor and was becoming well known as a writer of plays. At the time of his death in 1616, only some of his plays had been published in single editions. The plays were collected and published in 1623, seven years after he died. There is proof that people in Shakespeare's time thought highly of him. After his death, even his rival Ben Jonson said,

    "Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show,
    To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
    He was not of an age, but for all time!"

He was involved in the building of the Globe Theatre in 1599.

Marriage and children
Although Shakespeare was married to a woman and fathered three children, Susanna, Hamnet and Judith, people have debated his sexuality. Some people, such as Peter Holland of the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham University, have argued that Shakespeare was possibly bisexual because of some of the sonnets he wrote that were directed toward young men.
Who wrote "Shakespeare"?

About 150 years after Shakespeare died, some writers began to say that the work called "Shakespeare" were not really written by William Shakespeare. They had various reasons for saying this. For example, the person who wrote "Shakespeare" knew a lot about other countries (especially Italy and France), but William Shakespeare never left England. Several other writers of "Shakespeare" have been suggested, such as Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Most scholars believe that William Shakespeare did write the works that bear his name.

List of Shakespeare's plays
Shakespearean tragedies

•     Romeo and Juliet
•     Macbeth
•     King Lear
•     Hamlet
•     Othello
•     Titus Andronicus
•     Julius Caesar
•     Antony and Cleopatra
•     Coriolanus
•     Troilus and Cressida
•     Timon of Athens

Shakespearean comedies

•     The Comedy of Errors
•     All's Well That Ends Well
•     As You Like It
•     A Midsummer Night's Dream
•     Much Ado About Nothing
•     Measure for Measure
•     The Tempest
•     Taming of the Shrew
•     Twelfth Night or What You Will
•     The Merchant of Venice
•     The Merry Wives of Windsor
•     Love's Labour's Lost
•     The Two Gentlemen of Verona
•     Pericles Prince of Tyre
•     Cymbeline
•     The Winter's Tale

Shakespearean histories

•     King John (play)
•     Richard II
•     Richard III
•     Henry IV, part 1
•     Henry IV, part 2
•     Henry V
•     Henry VI, part 1
•     Henry VI, part 2
•     Henry VI, part 3
•     Henry VIII

Lost plays

•     Love's Labour's Won
•     Cardenio

text from Simple Wikipedia

Shakespeare background info from Cliff Scrogin

Queen Elizabeth II has become the longest reigning monarch in the United Kingdom

Queen Victoria

On the 9th of September 2015, Queen Elizabeth II has become the longest reigning monarch in the United Kingdom. Until that date, the longest reigning monarch was Queen Victoria.

This is the Wikipedia List of Longest reigning monarchs:

Queen Elizabeth II:

Queen Elizabeth II

Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary; born 21 April 1926) is the Queen of sixteen countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, and Saint Kitts and Nevis. She is the queen of each country separately, and all sixteen are independent countries. She became Queen when her father, King George VI, died on 6 February 1952.

• The countries of which she is Queen are known as Commonwealth realms. Their total population is over 129 million. Elizabeth II lives in the United Kingdom. In all the other countries where she is queen, a person has been chosen to represent her. This person is known as the Governor General.

• Elizabeth II is Queen and is interested in the running of her countries, but she does not tell the governments what to do. She has regular meetings with people from her governments, but it is they who run the countries. She performs ceremonies for the governments, gives out honours, and visits and supports many charities.
• Since 1947, the Queen has been married to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Prince Philip was born into the royal families of Greece and Denmark. Just before they were married, he became a citizen of the United Kingdom, and changed his name to Philip Mountbatten. He became the Duke of Edinburgh on the day he married, and became a Prince of the United Kingdom in 1957. The Queen and Prince Philip have four children, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

British Government and elections in the UK

10 Downing Street - Official Residence of the Prime Minister

The British Government is the government of the United Kingdom. Its official name is Her Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The Government is led by the Prime Minister, who chooses the other Ministers. The Prime Minister and the other most powerful Ministers belong to a group known as the Cabinet, who are the most important decision makers in the Government. These ministers are all members of Parliament. Laws are made by MPs voting in Parliament, which is called 'legislative authority'. These laws make what is called primary legislation. The government is chosen by the people of the United Kingdom voting in an election and, at least every five years, the people can vote again. The monarch selects the Prime Minister as the leader of the party who is likely to get the most votes in Parliament.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron 

Under the British constitution, executive authority, the power to use the laws to take action, belongs to the monarch, but this power is used only by, or on the advice of, the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. Laws passed by Parliament are always agreed ("given assent") by the monarch. The monarch generally always does things suggested by the elected government. The Cabinet members advise the monarch as part of a group called Privy Council. They also use their power directly as leaders of the Government departments.

The British kind of government is sometimes called parliamentary government, and its parliament is known as the "Mother of all Parliaments".

There are separate governments in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, each responsible to their own local parliament. These parliaments have certain limits decided by the main parliament in Westminster. There is no separate English Parliament.

The Prime Minister now is David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, who was chosen by Queen Elizabeth II on 11 May 2010 after the UK General Election on 6 May 2010. The election did not have a simple and obvious winner, even though the Conservatives had the most votes, because they almost had the same number as the other main party, the Labour party. This is called a hung parliament. So a coalition government was formed on the 12th of May 2010 between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. This is when two or more parties decide to share control.

These are the results of the 2015 general election:

taken from the BBC news website

Read more about the 2015 elections at the BBC News website.