Miranda Seymour
The Marriage Plot
The Trials of the King of Hampshire: Madness, Secrecy and Betrayal in Georgian England
By Elizabeth Foyster
Oneworld 330pp £20
Lunacy, as lovers of Wilkie Collins’s novels will be aware, was a lucrative business in 19th-century England (and not only for the owners of the country’s innumerable asylums). Anybody who wanted to lay their hands on a fortune – as did Collins’s magnificently wicked Count Fosco and his less lovable sidekick, Sir Percival Glyde – found it remarkably easy to lock away a perfectly sane heiress and to seize her estate.
The case of John Charles Wallop, third Earl of Portsmouth, newly investigated and beautifully narrated here by Elizabeth Foyster, a historian specialising in family history, was complicated by the fact that the earl’s eccentric habits offered him a wobbly perch on the Humpty-Dumpty wall of lunacy. Portsmouth was
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In 1524, hundreds of thousands of peasants across Germany took up arms against their social superiors.
Peter Marshall investigates the causes and consequences of the German Peasants’ War, the largest uprising in Europe before the French Revolution.
Peter Marshall - Down with the Ox Tax!
Peter Marshall: Down with the Ox Tax! - Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War by Lyndal Roper
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The Soviet double agent Oleg Gordievsky, who died yesterday, reviewed many books on Russia & spying for our pages. As he lived under threat of assassination, books had to be sent to him under ever-changing pseudonyms. Here are a selection of his pieces:
Literary Review - For People Who Devour Books
Book reviews by Oleg Gordievsky
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The Soviet Union might seem the last place that the art duo Gilbert & George would achieve success. Yet as the communist regime collapsed, that’s precisely what happened.
@StephenSmithWDS wonders how two East End gadflies infiltrated the Eastern Bloc.
Stephen Smith - From Russia with Lucre
Stephen Smith: From Russia with Lucre - Gilbert & George and the Communists by James Birch
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