"Memoirs of Hadrian" by Marguerite Yourcenar

The Pantheon in Rome was built by Hadrian

The fictionalised autobiography of Hadrian, one of the better Roman Emperors. He is old and dying and writes these memoirs of a way of advising Marcus Aurelius, whom he has designated as successor to his designated successor Antoninus Pius.

It is beautifully written, in crisp and elegant prose. There are some wonderful insights into the human condition (see Selected Quotes). But it is not a particularly entertaining example of historical fiction, like Hawker and the King's Jewel by Ethan Bale. This is no sword-and-sandals epic of the Roman Empire, no Gladiator or Ben-Hur or Spartacus. But it is thoughtful and, to the best of my knowledge, thoroughly researched. To that extent it reminded me of I, Claudius by Robert Graves and, like that novel, it suffers in that it has to stick to the history (which is sometimes just one damn thing after another) rather than being able to develop with plot, character and theme, like a novel can.

The chapter headings are in Latin, I have provided my best translations:

• Animula Vagula Blandula = Young soul, wandering, enchanting. This comes from the first line of a poem supposedly written by Hadrian in later life in which he asks the soul where it is going now it is leaving his body; it is a philosophical reflection on life and death.
• Varius Multiplex Multiformis = Varied, manifold and of many forms. This is a quote from the historian Sextus Aurelius Victor, used to describe Hadrian's curiosity and many talents.
• Tellus Stabilita = the firmly established earth. This was a phrase used by Hadrian on some of his coins with a depiction of the earth goddess Tellus, also known as Terra Mater or 'Mother Earth.
• Saeculum Aureum = The Golden Age. In the novel it refers to his time with his lover Antinous.
• Disciplina Augusta = military discipline. It was another phrase used on Hadrian's coins.
• Patientia = patience, endurance or suffering. Yet another legened from Hadrian's coins, these showing the figure of Patience seated and holding a shallow libation bowl and a staff. 

Selected quotes:

• “I have ... reached the age where life, for every man, is accepted defeat. To say that my days are numbered signifies nothing; they always were, and are so for us all. But uncertainty as to the place, the time, and the manner, which keeps us from distinguishing the goal toward which we continually advance, diminishes.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “I recall my childhood races on the dry hills of Spain, and the game played with myself of pressing onto the last gasp, never doubting that the perfect heart and healthy lungs would re-establish their equilibrium.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “An operation which is performed two or three times a day, and the purpose of which is to sustain life, surely merits our care. To eat a fruit is to welcome into oneself a fair living object, which is alien to us but is nourished and protected like us by the earth.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “I shall never believe in the classification of love among the purely physical joys ... until I see a gourmet sobbing with delight over his favourite dish like a lover gasping on a young shoulder.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “The story-tellers and spinners of erotic tales are hardly more than butchers who hang up for sale morsels of meat attractive to flies.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “A part of every life, even a life meriting very little regard, is spent in searching out the reasons for its existence, its starting point, and its source.” (Animula Vagula Blandula)
• “The most benighted of men are not without some glimmerings of the divine: that murderer plays passing well upon the flute; this overseer flaying the backs of his slaves is perhaps a dutiful sun; this simpleton would share with me his last piece of bread.” (Varius Multiplex Multiformis)
• “Different persons ruled me in turn ... I played host successively to the meticulous officer ... the melancholy dreamer ... the lover ... the haughty young lieutenant ... and finally the future statesman.” (Varius Multiplex Multiformis)
• “Morals are a matter of private agreement; decency is of public concern.” (Tellus Stabilita)
• “I have a little faith in laws. If too severe, they are broken, and with good reason. If too complicated, human ingenuity finds means to slip easily between the meshes of this trailing but fragile net. ... Any law too often subject to infraction is bad.” (Tellus Stabilita)
• “All nations which have perished up to this time have done so for lack of generosity; Sparta would have survived longer had she given her Helots some interest in that survival; there is always a day when Atlas ceases to support the weight of the heavens, and his revolt shakes the earth.” (Tellus Stabilita)
• “The condition of women is fixed by strange customs; they are at one and the same time subjected and protected, weak and powerful, too much despised and too much respected. In this chaos of contradictory usage, the practices of society are superimposed upon the fact of nature, but it is not easy to distinguish between the two.” (Tellus Stabilita)
• “From without came the few sounds of that Asiatic night: the whispering of slaves at my door; the soft rustle of a palm, and ... snores behind a curtain; the stamp of a horse's hoof; from farther away, in, the melancholy murmur of a song.” (Tellus Stabilita)
• “On many points, however, the thinking of our philosophers also seemed to be limited and confused, if not sterile. Three-quarters of our intellectual performances are no more than decorations upon a void.” (Disciplina Augusta)

November 2025; 237 pages

First published in French in 1951

I read a Penguin paperback translation into English by Grace Frick 'in collaboration with the author' which was issued in 1959 and reprinted in 1982

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Hawker and the King's Jewel" by Ethan Bale

 A classic thriller based in late mediaeval Europe. After the defeat of Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth, Yorkist knight Sir John Hawker has to protect Sir Giles, Richard's bastard son, and deliver a valuable ruby to the Doge of Venice. Together with a motley band of warriors, including at least one who will betray him, Hawker travels across Europe to encounter more duplicity in the city whose streets are canals. 

And whatever happened to the Princes in the Tower?

It's a classic of its kind. The research is obvious, allowing the reader to wallow in authentic reenactment. The scenes of fighting are regularly delivered. There are good characters with whom the reader can identify and hope will survive (Jack the squire and Sir Giles) and there are villains (Dieudonnee). The plot is perfectly paced on the four-part model, even if the final quarter is split in two so that a final twist can be delivered. 

My only complaint? Referring to cheese (I presume) as the "the white stuff" in a too obvious attempt to avoid repeating the word 'cheese'.

Selected quotes:

• "Even an arsehole has its purpose." (Ch 3) 
• "Marriage comes from love as vinegar comes from wine." (Ch 21)
• "You are like the scribe who can see nothing more than the page his nose touches." (Ch 22)

November 2025; 337 pages

Published by Canelo in 2022

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Never saw you coming" by K L S Fuerte

 Not happy ever after. The marriage of two young teachers in London starts with romance but swiftly descends into frenzy.

The prologue is a first person narrated back story which summarily explains that the narrating protagonist is a young French woman living in England and studying education at Cambridge. Chapter 1 begins the narrative proper. It is written in a diary style, although each entry is a summary of the events of a week, or a month.

Chapter 2 heralds a sudden change. It starts with Edward masturbating to online porn and continues with email evidence of his relationship with a student. The narrator responds with shock and horror and fractured sentences, a sort of stream of consciousness style.

As the story continues, it becomes clear that Edward has mental health problems, perhaps suffering from bipolar syndrome. The narrator  seems to live on the edge of hysterical melodrama and their relationship veers from wild sex to fury. She is enormously self-centred and shows almost no empathy ("The man was so inconvenient with his poor diabetes management. I felt so many times like his nurse, rather than his wife"; Ch 9). I found it difficult to believe she could be a mother to two very young children (whose care seems delegated to au pairs) and a senior teacher. 

Sometimes the story is detailed and at other times it proceeds at a breakneck speed. For example, the narrator's first pregnancy lasts for a few pages and Edward's year teaching in Hackney gets three paragraphs. I found it difficult to keep track of a large cast of characters and I was also confused by some of the details of the plot. For one brief moment Edward seems to suffer from diabetes ("Edward’s hypos in the middle of the night. Why does he always have to go hypoglycaemic when I really want to sleep, or when it is really late and there is no sugar in the kitchen"; Ch 9) but this does not seem to be mentioned outside this chapter. The events of the prologue also seem unrelated to the rest of the book. The moments of narrative incoherence gave a sort of verisimilitude; there was a feeling that this must be a true story because real-life can be chaotic.

Whether it is autobiographical or not, it is told with enormous energy and passion. It ends on an amazing cliff-hanger. While my own novels feature unresolved endings (such is life), the fact that the sequel is immediately advertised makes me think that this is might be a novel which has been chopped into two novellas. 

If you enjoy reading about a stormy relationship in which all emotions are perpetually at boiling point, this is the book for you.

Selected quotes:

• "We make love like there is no tomorrow, every night."
• "I’m a control freak! I am always in the power position; well not anymore."
• "one of those mum-to-be magazines, which said that the father determined the sex of the baby, but the mother passed on the intelligence."

November 2025

Published in 2021; I read the Amazon kindle edition

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Angry Brigade" by Gordon Carr

 As the subtitle tells us, this is "a history of Britain's first Urban Guerilla [sic] group." 

I was at school when the Angry Brigade flourished. They had a campaign of bombing property targets (they claim that no-one was ever killed, although some people were seriously injured). As such, they were mild compared to the Baader Meinhof 'Red Army Faction' in Germany or the Brigato Rosso in Italy. It was a time of political violence. Internationally the peasants of North Vietnam were defying the military might of the USA. The CIA were undermining Chile whose democratically elected communist president Salvador Allende would die during a coup against him. Spain and Portugal were still run by fascist dictators who had been installed before the second world war and Greece was taken over by the Colonels in a military coup. Czechoslovakia was to enjoy a brief 'Prague spring' before tanks from the Warsaw Pact took back control. 

In the USA, the Symbionese Liberation Amry kidnapped Patty Hearst and she subsequently took part in a bank robbery they organised, as related in American Heiress by Jeffrey Toobin. 

Things were even different in the UK. The demands of the Catholics in Northern Ireland for equal suffrage had been met with British troops on the streets and soon political dissidents were to be interned without trial. And the antics of the Angry Brigade were soon to be quashed by the police acting with questionable legality. Not only were people arrested and questioned without recourse to legal representation, sometimes for longer than the then maximum of 24 hours, but also there were so many questions raised about the searches and the interviews that the jury acquitted half of the defendants, clearly believing that the police had planted evidence and made up confessions. The trial was one of the longest in British criminal history.

These years saw the birth of Gay Liberation, Women's Lib and Feminism, and Black Power. The lasting legacy of all this activism was the real gains made in terms of equal rights and equal opportunities for women, ethnic minorities and homosexuals. Things are not yet perfect but they are much better than they were.

Not that the Angry Brigade were innocent. Bombers aren't. They also used a sub machine gun to spray bullets at the Spanish Embassy in London. In a bizarre twist, all but one of the bullets missed. For 48 hours the Embassy officials were unaware of the attack, until a cleaner found a bullethole in a pane of glass; the bullet took even longer to be located. During this period the Angry Brigade issued one of their Communiques complaining that the authorities had suppressed news of the attack. It was this that led the police to realise that the communiques really did come from a group that was carrying out attacks!

One of the targets of the Angry Brigade was the 1970 Miss World contest. There had been controversy because the organisers had allowed two contestants from South Africa, one black and one white. TheBrigade bombed a BBC Outside broadcast van. During the competition, Women's Liberation protesters threw flour bombs and heckled the host, Bob Hope. This protest was the subject of a movie called Misbehaviour released in 2020 but so far as I remember the Brigade's bombing went unmentioned.

Of particular interest to me was the fact that John Barker, one of the leading lights of the Brigade, was inspired by the Situationists and in particular The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, the subject of a biography Guy Debord by Andy Merrifield. 

The book is even printed in a way that reminded me of the underground magazines of the period with black and white photos and drawings mingled into the text. To add to the authentic feel, the proof reading is imperfect. It is topped and tailed with pieces from John Barker who was convicted (he claims to have been framed yet admits he was guilty) and Stuart Christie who was found not guilty.

November 2025; 248 pages

Published by PM Press in 2020

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Precious Bane" by Mary Webb

 

I read this book because I had been told that it was the main object of the satire of Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. In fact, according to wikipedia, it is another novel by Mary Webb that was targeted. 

I was also told I wouldn't be able to read the book because it was so ridiculous. This proved not to be the case.

It is melodrama. It is written in dialect. But it is well done. The dialect is consistent. The plot is well-constructed. The characters are credible. It won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse Prize in 1926.

Prue Sarn has a hare lip which disfigurement means she is unlikely to be able to marry. It also means that, although she is accepted within her close-knit farming community, outsiders view her as a witch (the book is set in the finals stages and aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, in the 1810s, in deepest rural Shropshire). It doesn't help that she is taught to read and write by the local 'wizard', Mr Beguildy, who scrapes a living by selling charms, live peep shows, and dodgy health advice. 

After Prue's dad dies her brother, Gideon, takes over the farm, determined to make a lot of money and become gentry. He drives himself, and her, and his mother; his only soft spot is his love for Beguildy's daughter, Jancis, but her dad disapproves. Meanwhile Prue has fallen in love with Kester, the local weaver, who has himself alienated the community by putting an end to bull-baiting, the local sport. 

Kester is rather too goody-goody, a shining knight who literally rides in on a horse to save his damsel in distress, but Gideon is a fascinatingly complex tragic hero, fearless, ambitious and hard-working, driven by money but conflicted by his love for Jancis. These people may be mommets driven by the demands of the melodramatic plot, but Webb has endowed them with life. 

The rural setting was easy to parody by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm and by Evelyn Waugh in Scoop but Webb's descriptions are beautifully written and clearly based on her deep knowledge of the countryside; in this sense she's no worse and perhaps a little more accessible than Thomas Hardy. 

The dialect is easy to parody too, but again it is perfectly done and from a position of knowledge. I thought it was a strength of the novel; I enjoyed:

• A tossy-ball: a ball made from entangled cowslips (other flowers are available) which can be lightly tossed into the air.
• Tuthree: two or three, compare with twartree from the Shetlan dialect of the Shetland Isles, a small number, a few
• Mommet: a puppet
• Swiving: cutting corn, harvesting, not to be confused with ‘swiving’ = copulating!

There are also some interesting local customs:

• Sin-Eating: at a funeral, a scapegoat - usually a poor man paid in bread and wine - pawns his soul to take on it the sins of the recently deceased.
• A love-spinning: when the women of the village get together to spin in celebration and in aid of a couple who are getting betrothed.
• Playing cards for cakes
• Pretending to be Venus, rising naked from a trapdoor, for the benefit of the Squire and his pals at a peepshow put on by Beguildy.
• A hiring-fair in which workers present themselves to employers to be hired, a bit like a slave market except for the fact that the workers are, at least in theory, free.

Selected quotes:

• “He said the past and the future were two shuttles in the hands of the Lord, weaving Eternity. ... But I think we cannot know what the past and the future are. We are so small and helpless on the Earth, that it is like a green rush cradle where mankind lies, looking up at the stars, but not knowing what they be.” (1.1)
• “It seemed a criss-cross sort of world, where you bury your father at night, and straightway begin to think of breakfast and housen and gold with the first light of dawn.” (1.5)
• “Saddle your dreams afore you ride ‘em, my wench.” (1.6)
• “ I hearkened to the blackbirds singing near and far. When they were a long way off you could scarcely disentangle them from all the other birds ... It was a weaving of many threads.” (1.7)
• “I be as I was made. None can go widdershins to that.” (2.3)
• “Maybe you've seen a dragon-fly coming out of its case? It does so wrostle, it does so wrench, you'd think it's life ud go from it. I've seen ‘em turn somersets like a mountebank in their agony. For get free they mun, and it cosses ‘em a pain like the birth pain, very pitiful to see.” (2.3)
• “She was the candle of his eye.” (2.3)
• “I was like a maid standing at the meeting of the lane-ends on May Day with a posy-knot as a favour for a rider that should come by. And behold! The horseman rode straight over me, and left me, posy and all, in the mire.” (2.3)
• “You may see flesh alone and feel naught but loathing. You may see it in the butcher's shop cut up, or in the gutter, drunken, or in the coffin, dead. For the world is full of flesh as the chandler's shelf is full of lanthorns at the beginning of winter.” (2.8)
• “The wounded look that is ever on the faces of men between the coming of the lust of the eye and its satisfying.” (2.8)
• “It's like the bran pie they give the Lullingford children, Christmas. You make get summat, but most likely you'll only get a motto. And if you get summat, ten to one it inna what you want, for what you want inna in the pie.” (2.9)
• “I be getting ancient and old, and the time draws nigh when life’ll be a burden.” (3.3)
• “When you dwell in a house that you mislike, you will look out of the window a deal more than those that are content with their dwelling.” (3.5)
• “I got up and put on my clo’es, for I supposed that whether it was the Judgement or not I’d better wear them, though in the pictures the redeemed go in their night rails. But I did feel that I must wait to get to heaven afore I could be at my ease to stand afore Sexton’s Sammy in my night-gown.” (4.2)
• “Only a fool will dip and dip in a dry well.” (4.2)
• “You’d as lief be dead as quick.” (4.3)
• Mother’s refrain: “Could I help it if the hare crossed my path?” (1.2 and later)

Yes, it is melodrama, yes, some aspects are over the top. But the passion Webb exhibits as she goes full tilt into the dialect and the descriptions rescue this novel and make it a classic of its kind.

November 2025; 288 pages

First published by Jonathan Cape in 1924

My paperback edition was a 2004 reprint of the 1978 Virago paperback.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

The plot: Spoiler alert

At his father's funeral, Gideon offers to be the Sin-Eater and take his father's sins upon his soul, if his mother makes the family farm over to him. He then agrees with his sister Prue - who has a hare lip - that they will work all hours God sends to make the farm profitable and themselves rich. He wants to buy a big house for himself and his girlfriend Jancis. Prue does have time to take lessons in reading and writing from Jancis's father Mr Beguildy, a local 'wizard' who disapproves of Jancis and Gideon. Nevertheless, Mrs Beguildy hosts a love-spinning to celebrate the betrothal of Gideon to Jancis; at this event Prue first sets eyes on weaver Kester. Prue then volunteers to take the place of Jancis when Beguildy 'raises Venus' giving the local squire a peep-show experience of a naked woman; unfortunately Kester is there too but Prue assumes that, since her face was hidden, she has got away with it.

Prue discovers that while she is accepted in her local community, her hare lip means that in the nearby market town she is viewed as a witch. Kester turns up at a scheduled bull-baiting to buy the bull before it is baited and offering to fight the dogs himself in the bull's place. Since his job takes him from farm to farm he knows the dogs and has befriended them, so most of them wag their tails. But he is savaged by one dog and is in danger except that Prue runs into the arena and stabs the dog to death. Nevertheless, bull-baiting is abandoned but Kester has made enemies. He goes to London to learn colour weaving so he can survive without farm work.

Gideon's harvest promises to make him a fortune and the arrangements for his marriage are well under way. Beguildy being out of town, Gideon and Jancis anticipate the honeymoon and are surprised by Beguildy's return. Beguildy sets fire to Gideon's gathered harvest and is arrested for arson but the damage has been done and Gideon tells Jancis to return to her mother. Gideon is near bankruptcy. When his own mother can no longer work and therefore becomes a liability rather than an asset, he kills her by lacing her tea with foxglove. Tilly the Sexton's daughter who has long loved Gideon from afar knows what he has done and tries to blackmail him into marrying her. In a snow-bound winter, Jancis returns with Gideon's new-born baby, but Gideon refuses to let her stay in the house so she drowns herself and the baby in the Mere. Gideon, haunted by the ghosts of Jancis, the baby and his mother, also drowns himself. 

Prue is alone and undefended. In town, a mob accuses her of being a witch (it doesn't help that she consorted with 'wizard' Beguildy and that she can read and write) and attack her. Kester rides back to town in the nick of time.