John Valdimir Price
Holland House
Holland House is a name rather more evocative and promising than, say, Transport House, and its attractions for ordinary readers as well as scholars have been considerable. For one thing, who today could resist Lady Holland, the ‘heroine’ as it were of Holland House? Born in the same year as Walter Scott (1771), Elizabeth Vassal married Sir Godfrey Webster in 1786; she was 15, he 49. She lived abroad for a time in the late 18th century and gradually became estranged from her husband. Her liaison with Henry Richard Fox, who became 3rd Baron Holland in 1774 at the age of one, commenced in 1794. Sir Godfrey and she were divorced by an Act of Parliament in 1797, when she married Lord Holland.
Their first child, Charles, was born before this marriage, which produced two other children. Lady Holland also had three children by her first marriage, but none of these children seems to have excited any maternal instinct in her. Instead, she devoted
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
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw