Sarah Bradford
Merry Monarch
Prince Albert Edward, later King Edward VII, was, according to his biographer, ‘extraordinarily secret about archives and resistant to any sort of biography’ – but then he had a great deal to conceal. Mistresses, racing, shooting, gambling, overindulgence in food and huge cigars characterised Bertie’s life, even after he succeeded his mother as monarch at the age of fifty-nine. Chapter headings such as ‘The Aylesford Scandal’, ‘Lillie Langtry’, ‘Prince Hal’, ‘Prince of Pleasure’ and ‘Scandal’ feature in the first two parts of the book. Even after he became king, there is ‘King Edward the Caresser’, a pun invented by Henry James.
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.