Anne Somerset
Webster’s Muse
As Sarah Gristwood remarks in her preface, ‘History has an unamiable habit of losing the losers.’ This being so, Arbella Stuart usually features as little more than a footnote in studies of the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts. With hindsight it is easy to assume that she was always destined to be consigned to obscurity, but Gristwood reminds us that in her own day Arbella was believed to have a respectable chance of succeeding Elizabeth I as England’s Queen.
Arbella was the granddaughter of two formidable women. Her paternal grandmother was Henry VIII’s niece, the Countess of Lennox, and it was from her that Arbella derived her claim to the crown. Her mother’s mother was the Countess of Shrewsbury (better known as Bess of Hardwick), a terrifying virago who
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
'We must all "shoot down the canard", McManus writes, that the World Cup is going to a nation "that doesn’t know or appreciate the Beautiful Game".'
Barnaby Crowcroft on the rise of Qatar.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/full-of-gas
Delighted to make my debut in @Lit_Review with a review of Philip Short's heavyweight new bio, Putin: His Life and Times
(Yes, it's behind a paywall, but newspapers and magazines need to earn money too...)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/vlad-the-invader
'As we examined more and more data from the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters ... we were amazed to find that there is almost never a case for permanently moving people out of the contaminated area after a big nuclear accident.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying