In the autumn of 1792, a few months after Louis XVI’s overthrow, the historian, geographer and ex-priest Jean-Louis Soulavie arrived at the abandoned palace of Versailles with official permission to examine the former king’s archives. In the library on the fourth floor of the royal apartments, just below the smithy
John Guy’s new book is devoted to the last nineteen years of Elizabeth I’s life, but why call them ‘The Forgotten Years’? Who has forgotten them? Certainly not historians. In 1995, Guy himself edited an influential collection of essays entitled The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court & Culture in the Last Decade, which sparked off […]
Vita Sackville-West described Edwardian England as ‘a world where pleasure fell like a ripened peach for the outstretching of a hand’. One hand that would certainly have been greedily outstretched was that of Edward VII, whose extravagant, pleasure-loving nature in many ways defined his kingdom, as Richard Davenport-Hines demonstrates in this entertaining book in the […]
‘Don’t talk too much. Listen instead. Don’t ever appear surprised; it looks provincial. Don’t reveal your ignorance by asking for explanations. You can learn a thousand things without anyone realising you didn’t know them already.’ These words of advice were uttered by Madame de Maintenon, mistress and eventually morganatic wife of King Louis XIV of […]
Early in October 1354 Giannino di Guccio, a merchant of Siena, was told that he was the lost heir to the kingdom of France. He had been switched soon after birth by his wet nurse and then taken away. The man who told him this was Cola di Rienzo, the governor of Rome, who then […]
Leanda de Lisle’s ably executed biography of the unlucky Grey sisters starkly illuminates the perils of being a princess in sixteenth-century England. Although at the time few people disputed that it was undesirable for a woman to rule the kingdom, the Tudor dynasty’s dearth of male heirs meant that these three great-nieces of Henry VIII […]
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Juggling balls, dead birds, lottery tickets, hypochondriac journalists. All the makings of an excellent collection. Loved Camille Bordas’s One Sun Only in the latest @Lit_Review
Natalie Perman - Normal People
Natalie Perman: Normal People - One Sun Only by Camille Bordas
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Despite adopting a pseudonym, George Sand lived much of her life in public view.
Lucasta Miller asks whether Sand’s fame has obscured her work.
Lucasta Miller - Life, Work & Adoration
Lucasta Miller: Life, Work & Adoration - Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson
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