John Adamson
Eyewitness To An Era
Dancing to the Precipice: Lucie de La Tour du Pin and the French Revolution
By Caroline Moorehead
Chatto & Windus 480pp £20
In a book replete with vivid moments, none is more cinematic than its heroine’s homecoming to Le Bouilh, her family’s vast and still unfinished château in the Gironde, in the aftermath of the Terror. When she had left it, three years earlier, just as the French Revolution was revving up into its most murderous and hyperactive phase, the palatial house had embodied all that was most modern, magnificent and forward-looking in the aristocratic haut monde: the chaste neo-Classicism of le style Louis XVI; the fine furnishings, pictures, Gobelins tapestries and rock-crystal chandeliers; the extensive library stocked with the morocco-bound wisdom of the philosophes. Now, systematically pillaged by the functionaries of the Revolution, the great house
appeared vast, gaunt, unwelcoming. The garden was overgrown, the outbuildings derelict; the immense high-ceilinged drawing rooms with their tile and stone floors echoed at every step. [Shortly after its owners’ departure, three years earlier], men from the local municipality had arrived to conduct a sale of the château’s
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk