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 order from our bookshop
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.
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'Fiona Shaw, in Jonathan Miller’s production, is the best shrew I have seen. She starts off in a mustard yellow dress with a mustard sharp tongue.'
From the archive, Kate Kellaway on a 1988 production of 'The Taming of the Shrew'.
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'He was not a revolutionary at all of course. He was only marginally a socialist. His tradition was rooted in the Liberal aristocracy, and his politics were entirely bounded by Parliament.'
From the archive, Paul Foot on Tony Benn's diaries.
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