"Star of the Morning" by Kirsten Ellis

 This is a biography of Lady Hester Stanhope. Not only was she an amazing woman but also she knew everybody there was to know in the Regency worlds of England and Lebanon. She was born into power and privilege, her father being an Earl and her grandfather being Pitt the Elder; after her uncle Pitt the Younger died she was granted a government pension of £1,200 (worth over £120,000 today). But she was also born a woman in a patriarchy where she couldn't even vote (although having lovers was very much less of a problem than it became in the more puritanical Victorian days; Hester had a number). She must have been very intrepid to travel abroad as she did into the Ottoman Empire which, despite its nominal unity, seemed to be composed of endlessly conflicting warlords and bandits. She suffered shipwreck and plague and was regularly exposed to risk (although we should realise that England pre-sanitation wasn't a very healthy place and life, especially for child-bearing women, was frequently cut short; furthermore, Hester didn't exactly travel solo but with guns and a retinue of servants including her own private doctor and she always ensured she had a male companion).

The book is brilliantly paced. Her early life in England fills the first quarter of the book, Egypt the second and Lebanon the third and fourth which are divided almost equally between her political machinations in the third quarter and her decline into religious madness in the fourth.

She went on a treasure hunt after finding a "curious manuscript" (the treasure chest turned out to be empty but she found a wonderful statue ... which she had smashed to pieces so she would leave no trace of her excavations). She was party to a plot to liberate Napoleon from exile in St Helena using a submarine. She described using a bezoar (a 'serpent stone') in an attempt to cure the plague and preparing Mandragora to be used as an aphrodisiac. She visited the city of Palmyra, the desert city of Queen Zenobia, later immortalised as Semiramis. She joined in with mystic rites in some of the sects whose beliefs fused Christianity, Judaism, Islam and more ancient tribal religions. She could have inspired the plot for a whole series of novels.

The only problem with this book was that I kept wanting to find out more about the other characters in the stellar cast list:

•  She acted as hostess for the unmarried Prime Minister Pitt the Younger, living with him in 10 Downing Street when he was PM and Walmer Castle when he wasn't.
• Her father was an Earl, notorious for siding with the French revolutionaries. He became an eccentric inventor. Family life must have been difficult and all the kids had to escape when they got older (on one occasion using knotted sheets from their bedroom window), Hester's sister by eloping with the local apothecary. 
• Her brother, who became an heir, tried to adopt (perhaps because he fancied him) Kaspar Hauser, the 'wild boy' who may have been the heir to the Duke of Baden; he was granted guardianship; there are suggestions that he might have sought to send the boy abroad into Hester's custody and he was later accused of involvement in Kaspar's assassination./
• Horne Tooke, a radical politician who spent time in the Tower accused of seditious treason
• Richard Brothers, a crazed millennial prophet, who predicted that Hester would ride into Jerusalem as 'Queen of the Jews' in a sort of apocalyptic end-of-days scenario
• Lord Byron, the poet, whom she met (with his Greek boyfriend) in Greece which he was trying to liberate

Among the men who were or might have been her lovers were

• Sir John Moore, who died during the Peninsular campaign and is nowadays best remembered for a poem about his funeral
• The Earl of Camelford, whose Scarlet Pimpernel type activities included an attempt to assassinate Napoleon
• General Miranda, a South American revolutionary who liberated Venezuela with Bolivar
• Michael Bruce, grandson of an explorer, who, after Hester, went on to smuggle a Bonapartist out of a France ruled by a restored (and vindictive) Bourbon government and spent time in a French jail for this
• John Lewis Burckhardt, the man who rediscovered Petra
• Vincent Boutin, archaologist and probably Napoleonic spy
• Almaz, her Arab gardener

This is a well-written biography about an amazing woman. Why is it out of print?????

April 2023; 394 pages

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

"Nightmare Abbey" by Thomas Love Peacock

I met Sean at the book launch of the second novel by Ruth Hogan whose first is The Keeper of Lost Things. Sean is the only person I have ever met to have read the complete works of Sir Walter Scott. Sean recommended Nightmare Abbey to me.

This is a comic novella published in 1818 which satirises Peacock's literary circle which included the poets Shelley (Scythrop), Coleridge (Mr Flosky) and Byron (Mr Cypress).

Mr Glowry lives with his son, Scythrop, in Nightmare Abbey: gloomy people in a gloomy house. They have a house party, including, at various times:

• Mr (and Mrs Hilary). He is cheerful and the voice of common sense in the book.
• His niece and ward Marionetta, who has “some coquetry and more caprice” (p 50) and alternately woos Scythrop and rejects his advances. She is a tease and can send up the others.
• Mr Flosky “a very lachrymose and morbid gentleman, of some note in the literary world” who hankers after “the good old times” (p 44) He has a chapter when he spouts philsophical gibberish at Marionetta who, frustrated, concludes that he either doesn’t know or won’t tell her.
• Mr Toobad who believes that the devil is in charge of the world and always dampens the suggestion of hope with the phrase “not in our time” (p 45) Mr Toobad manages to fall down the stairs and fall into the Abbey moat; he provides the physical comedy. 
• Reverend Mr Larynx “a good-natured accommodating divine, who was always most obligingly ready to take a dinner and a bed at the house of any country gentleman in distress for a companion” and who can be all things to all people.
• Mr Listless whom Mr G found in London found “stretched on the rack of too easy a chair” (p 49); when discussing ghosts he declares that “I once saw a ghost myself, in my study, which is the last place with anyone but a ghost would look for me.” (p 109) 
• Mr Asteria, an ichthyologist, on a quest to find a mermaid, who thinks he sees one in the Abbey moat.
• Mr Cypress, about to embark for a foreign tour of ruins.

From time to times these characters have a post-prandial discussion. At these moments the normnal prose style of the book turns into a playscript format. Discussions include modern literature

The plot, such as it is, revolves around Scythrop who is what we would today call a conspiracy theorist and has published a book (seven copies sold) about his plans to use the Illuminati to achieve world improvement. He is torn between his love for Marionetta, who represents frivolity and fun, and Celinda, who arrives late in the story, and represents learning and seriousness.

Mostly, however, the novella is a vehicle for Peacock to show of his learning and his wit. There are moments when the characters transcened their caricatures and one scene in which the delightful Marionetta, possibly the best character, is teasing Scythrop, who is besotted with her and pretending to read Dante. She says “‘I see you are in the middle of Purgatory’. - ‘I am in the middle of hell,’ said Scythrop furiously. ‘Are you?’ said she, ‘then come across the room and I will sing you the finale of Don Giovanni’.” (p 64) Shortly after she observes to Mr Listless  that a “compendious method of courtship” is to read a book from the centre turning pages randomly back and forth “and she will immediately perceive that you are desperately in love with her.” (p 65)

In the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, NA is described as being "close to burlesque of the Gothic novel".

Selected quotes:

• “she had mistaken the means for the end - that riches, rightly used, are instruments of happiness, but are not in themselves happiness.” (p 39) 
• “She often went her daily rounds through a series of deserted apartments, every creature in the house vanishing at the creak of her shoe.” (p 40) 
• “He was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head” (p 40)
• “what, sir, is love to a windmill? Not grist, I am certain.” (p 54)
• “Laughter and merriment make a human being no better than a baboon.” (p 56)
• Visiting ancient monuments is "much the same as if a lover should dig up the buried form of his mistress, and gaze upon relics which are anything but herself, to wander among a few mouldy ruins, that are only imperfect indexes to lost volumes of glory, and meet at every step the more melancholy ruins of human nature - a degenerate race of stupid and shrivelled slaves, grovelling in the lowest depths of servility and superstition.” (p 98)
• “a happy disposition finds materials of enjoyment everywhere” whilst a “discontented temper ... is always busy in detecting deficiencies, and feeding dissatisfaction with comparisons. The one gathers all the flowers, the other all the nettles, in its path. The one has the faculty of enjoying everything, the other of enjoying nothing. The one realises all the pleasure of the present good; the other converts it into pain, by pining after something better, because it is not present” (p 79)
• “We are most of us like Don Quixote, to whom a windmill was a giant, and Dulcinea a magnificent princess: all more or less the dupes of our own imagination.” (p 110)

May 2018; 86 pages

Rated 9th in the Guardian's best 100 novels of all time. 

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

"The News from Waterloo" by Brian Cathcart

After Wellington had defeated Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo, Wellington had to write an official dispatch before sending it, via horse, coach, sailing boat, rowing boat and finally coach again, to London. In London the government and the Stock market worried. Since his escape from Elba Napoleon seemed unstoppable. The Government had raised a loan of an unprecedented £36 million (in the form of a loan called an Omnium, which is presumably where Trollope got his name for the Duke of the Palliser novels) to pay for a new army just days before and many bankers had their fortunes at risk if Wellington lost. But there was no instant communication, even the optical telegraph which the Admiralty had installed during the recent hostilities had been decommissioned after Napoleon's first defeat. It was 16 hours after the result of the battle that the dispatch was handed to Henry Percy at 1 PM on Monday 19th June; he reached London at 11 PM on Wednesday 21st June; it took 58 hours for the news to travel.

This was a time when newspapers didn't have reporters in the field (only Parliamentary correspondents) so the only unofficial sources of news were:

• Mr Sutton who had heard the news of Quatre Bras, the Napoleon Wellington skirmish 48 hours before Waterloo that ended in a draw (and Wellington falling back) which Sutton misinterpreted as an allied victory, telling London on Tuesday morning.
• The Green Knight of Kerry who spoke with Wellington after Quatre Bras and therefore knew the true situation
• The mysterious Mr C who was at the exiled court of the French King in Ghent when he heard the news of Waterloo and rushed to London, arriving Wednesday morning.
• And possibly an unknown informant of Nathan Rothschild who enabled the banker to buy government stock and make a profit

Cathcart, who also wrote even more brilliant The Fly in the Cathedral, tells these stories in an authoritative but fantastically clear and readable way. He debunks many myths. People just didn't use carrier pigeons in those days. Rothschild wasn't on the battlefield. Rothschild didn't start by selling shares causing a massive panic before buying loads up (the stock market records show no such panic). David Ricardo, however, made sufficient money to retire from promoting stocks and, working with his friend Thomas Malthus who also made money, found Economics as a science. The myths debunked, there is a still a remarkably dramatic story.

And one mystery is left: who was Mr C?

Great history. August 2016; 297 pages