Anne Sebba
Matriarchs & Money
The Women of Rothschild: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Famous Dynasty
By Natalie Livingstone
John Murray 480pp £25
Within a year of Amschel Mayer Rothschild’s wife, Eva, dying in 1848, the childless septuagenarian announced at a family dinner that he intended to remarry and that his bride would be Julie, his eighteen-year-old great-niece. As Natalie Livingstone comments in this absorbing portrait of several generations of Rothschild women, the fact that the old man, one of five sons of the Frankfurt-born founder of the banking dynasty, was in a position to make this outrageous claim to a teenager ‘and be met only with silence and blushes speaks to the disturbing power of the Rothschild men over the women of the family’.
Julie eventually escaped Amschel’s clutches after a male relative objected to the proposed marriage. What Livingstone makes clear from the first chapters of her riveting revisionist study is that the Rothschild wives and sisters did much more than simply produce offspring, although they did plenty of that and
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
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm