Catherine Peters
Court in the Act
Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady
By Kate Summerscale
Bloomsbury 303pp £16.99
Kate Summerscale has done it again. Her rare combination of scholarly precision and novelistic skill, displayed in her award-winning account of a Victorian murder, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, are used to tremendous effect in this account of a scandalous divorce case. Once more her dark Victorian page-turner also reveals much about the age in which it took place.
By the 1850s England was in flux. New scientific theories and discoveries collided with established religion, and the increasing pressure for women’s rights was in conflict with legal precedent, social norms and the medical theories of the day. The generally accepted ideas about sex and gender in the 1850s were
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In 1524, hundreds of thousands of peasants across Germany took up arms against their social superiors.
Peter Marshall investigates the causes and consequences of the German Peasants’ War, the largest uprising in Europe before the French Revolution.
Peter Marshall - Down with the Ox Tax!
Peter Marshall: Down with the Ox Tax! - Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War by Lyndal Roper
literaryreview.co.uk
The Soviet double agent Oleg Gordievsky, who died yesterday, reviewed many books on Russia & spying for our pages. As he lived under threat of assassination, books had to be sent to him under ever-changing pseudonyms. Here are a selection of his pieces:
Literary Review - For People Who Devour Books
Book reviews by Oleg Gordievsky
literaryreview.co.uk
The Soviet Union might seem the last place that the art duo Gilbert & George would achieve success. Yet as the communist regime collapsed, that’s precisely what happened.
@StephenSmithWDS wonders how two East End gadflies infiltrated the Eastern Bloc.
Stephen Smith - From Russia with Lucre
Stephen Smith: From Russia with Lucre - Gilbert & George and the Communists by James Birch
literaryreview.co.uk