Kate Saunders
A Handsome Windsor
The Prince
By Celia Brayfield
Chatto & Windus 576pp £12.95
This is not a novel. It is a heist, planned with the ruthless precision of a bank job. Celia Brayfield’s first blockbuster, Pearls, was a modestly conventional effort about people with loads of money and loads of class, who do quite a lot of (but never enough) screwing. Her second, The Prince, is also disappointingly unpornographic, but it has a magic ingredient calculated to appeal to the blockbuster market’s silliest and most vulgar fantasies.
‘A British Prince,’ proclaims the cover of the proof copy, ‘A Royal Wedding. But Who Will Be The Bride?’ His Royal Highness, the Prince Richard, Duke of Sussex, ‘prodigal son of the House of Windsor’, is about to announce his engagement to a world panting with suspense. Do not rush
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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
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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:
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Book reviews by Oleg Gordievsky
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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
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