Paul Johnson
A Rum Lot
House of Treason: The Rise and Fall of a Tudor Dynasty
By Robert Hutchinson
Weidenfeld & Nicolson340pp £20 order from our bookshop
Robert Hutchinson, hitherto known chiefly as an expert in defence matters, has had the useful idea of illuminating the Tudor years, 1485–1603, by tracing the history of the most prominent noble house of the age, the Howards, Dukes of Norfolk. He has put a great deal of work into it, often examining the unpublished primary sources, and if he has discovered nothing new of importance, he has unearthed interesting details.
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Enjoying Susan Owens’s essay on English attitudes to nature in @Lit_Review. Turns out the early moderns were positively repulsed by hills, as described in this poem by Isaak Walton’s fishing chum Charles Cotton.
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https://literaryreview.co.uk/shady-habash
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https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness