Sarah Bradford
One Long Party?
The French Renaissance Court
By Robert J Knecht
Yale University Press 415pp £25 order from our bookshop
In November 1575 King Henri III of France and his mother, Catherine de’ Medici, amused themselves in the streets of Paris snatching lapdogs from nuns; three years earlier during the reign of Henry’s brother and predecessor, Charles IX, the quarry had been Huguenots hunted down and killed in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, allegedly again at the instigation of Catherine. As this history of the French Renaissance court demonstrates, the elaborate pursuit of game was the consuming passion of the Valois kings.
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
Only the Summer double issue (July/August) of @Lit_Review Lots of great summer reading.
'Like many a subsequent empire, Rome had a highly ambivalent relationship with the outsiders it needed to fuel its commerce, stock its slave markets and man its armies.'
@PParkerAuthor on the rise and fall of Alaric the Goth.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-barbarian-at-the-gate @douglasboin
'Of all modern English poets, Larkin is perhaps the one with whom most readers feel some imaginative affinity, a sense of having lived in the same world, with the same streets, the same unvoiced longings and anxieties.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/hull-revisited