"Shakespeare" by Bill Bryson

This might be a short, lightweight and very readable biography of the Bard but its 'evidence first' approach debunks a number of myths.

For example, the book considers whether Shakespeare spent his lost years in a Roman Catholic household in Lancashire and finds no evidence for it. It comprehensively debunks the theories that the plays were written by Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford and lists the considerable evidence that they were written by ... William Shakespeare. Though it does show that he lifted some of his material from his sources. 

I also learned that the Curtain Theatre had no curtains.

A perfect introductory biography to this great playwright.

Selected quotes:

• “Even the most careful biographers sometimes take a supposition ... and convert it within a page or two to some-[page break]thing like a certainty.” (Ch 1)
• “We know more about Shakespeare then about almost any other dramatist of his age.” (Ch 1)
• “A standard part of a teacher's training ... was how to give a flogging.” (Ch 2)
• "Vegetables were eaten mostly by those who could afford nothing better.” (Ch 3)
• “For foreigners English ale was an acquired taste even then ... it was ‘cloudy like horse’s urine’.” (Ch 3)
• “Shakespeare was a wonderful teller of stories so long as someone else had told them first.” (Ch 5)

May 2025; 195 pages

First published in 2007 by HarperPress

My updated paperback edition was issued by William Collins in 2016

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

"Graven with Diamonds" by Nicola Shulman

 

A biography of Thomas Wyatt, twice sent to the Tower by Henry VIII and the man who introduced the sonnet to England. Winner of the 2011 Writer's Guild Award as best non-Fiction book.

Subtitled: The many lives of Thomas Wyatt: Poet, Lover, Statesman, and Spy in the Court of Henry VIII.

He must have been a remarkable man and his life is well-told by this very readable biography. A nice feature is the use of his poetry to explain what he might have been thinking as he took part in some of the momentous events of Henry VIII's reign, including the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn - was Wyatt one of her lovers or did he betray those who might have been?

She writes very well (“This was a time of immense change, when medieval values mingled with those of the inpouring Renaissance humanism in varying degrees of emulsification.”; Ch 1) and explains the historical contexts clearly, usually - but not always - explaining any archaic words.

I'd have liked more about the poetry: he was the first to use Italian forms such as the "eight-line strambotto and terza rima, as well as the Petrachan sonnet" (Ch 5) But I can't really complain because Shulman is quite explicit that her work is focused on the man, not the history of poetic techniques.

I was left wanting to know more about the poetry and some of the minor but fascinating characters in Wyatt's drama.

Selected quotes:

• “Kent was a turbulent region, sensitively located between London and continental Europe.” (Ch 1)
• “C S Lewis’s sense of humour is arguably his own weak point. There is only one joke in the Narnia books.” (Ch 1) What is it? I feel I should have been told!
• “Baldly put, Skelton believed that old texts and deep matters could be best understood through studying the commentaries of wise men, accumulated over centuries; Erasmus and Mountjoy respected these mediations as much as a picture conservator respects crude overpainting and yellow varnish on some fresh, delicate panel.” (Ch 2)
• “Wyatt has invoked the possibility of unconditional love and with that, he exits the Middle Ages. He leaves behind the medieval lover, that industrious model of masculinity who must always be doing something ... He becomes an inward man whose feedings towards women are not expressed by a series of prescribed, public actions but communed in tunnels of intimacy, from heart to open heart.” (Ch 9)
• “This was of interest ... for reasons beyond prurient curiosity: the arrested men were all in possession of extensive lands and offices, now about to come up for redistribution under the treason laws.” (Ch 12)
• “Descriptions of diplomatic heroism rose in inverse relation to diplomatic successes, as Henry's legates, whose missions were often doomed to failure through no fault of their own, pressed for the introduction of an effort grade as well as one for achievement.” (Ch 19)

May 2025, 355 pages
First published in the UK by Short Books in 2011
My Steerforth Press paperback was the first US edition and was issued in 2013

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

"Guy Debord" by Andy Merrifield

 A surprisingly readable biography of political thinker and activist, writer and film-maker, Guy Debord who was influential in the 1968 Paris riots. 

I became interested in Debord when reading M John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again which is influenced by the idea of the dérive which this book defines as "drift" and originated as "a dreamy trek through varied Parisian passageways, forever on foot, wandering for hours, usually at night, identifying subtle moods and nuances of neighborhoods.” (Ch 2) Then I was impelled to read this biography after encountering Guy Debord in Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake: I think she bases her character of Bruno Lacombe on Debord. 

I was expecting the biography to be rather dry and not a little hard to understand. How wrong I was. Despite a penchant for lists, Merrifield is a fluent writer so his prose is easy to read, he never delves to deeply into the philosophy and what he does explain is reasonably comprehensible. Add in the fact that Debord had an interesting life, and that the fringe politics of the era was filled with swashbuckling (if brutal) factions such as the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof Faction,  and that there is an actual real-life murder mystery in chapter four, and this academic text became a page turner. 

The young Debord was a student at the Sorbonne in the early 1950s but this seems more a rationale for living in Paris, drinking heavily, frequenting the cafes, talking philosophy and becoming involved with Leftist students. He never finished his degree. Instead, he became a leading member of the Lettrists before breaking away to found the Situationist International (which at its founding included a leading member of the London Psychogeographical Association). The Situationists used the technique of détournement to satirise the establishment. 

He began making films and writing books. Presumably somebody sponsored him because he never seems to have had any conventional employment: “Nobody knew how Debord got by. He had no job, didn't want a job, opting instead to reside in a rich and happy poverty.” (Ch 2). He came to prominence with "The Society of the Spectacle" which became a suces d'estime on its publication in 1967 and is thought to have been the catalyst for the 1968 student riots in Paris, in which Debord participated although he was nearly twice the age of many of the other leaders. 

By now he was a celebrity of the left-wing and he continued writing (and making films) while living mostly abroad. Later he returned to France spending summers in rural seclusion and winters in Paris. He died by suicide after suffering from alcohol-induced peripheral neuritis.

He was a fan of the proto-surrealist poems of Lautreamont and a friend of Alexander Trocchi who wrote Cain's Book and invited him to New York where he lived in a barge on the Hudson river. He identified with the romantic bad boy characters from French literature and history, such as the mediaeval poet Francois Villon, the novelists Louis-Ferdinand Celine (author of Journey to the End of Night) and Pierre Mac Orlan and Cardinal Gondi, the 17th century cardinal whose street protests against Louis XIV led to the rebellion called the Fronde. Cardinal Gondi was a colourful character. “The cardinal was an odd mix of Catholic holy man - who never actually believed - and libertine. He was a priest and a duellist,  a courtier and a conspirator. He womanized while he spread the gospel ... he simultaneously incited mob violence and earnestly preached peace. He was duplicitous and conniving, both worshipped and reviled, as he indulged in a life of intrigue and bewildering adventure.” (Ch 3) Debord liked to be called Gondi.

Has he a legacy? Merrifield clearly thinks that capitalism has triumphed since Debord's time and that this make Debord's critique even more important: “History has never seemed so open, so unstable ... wars and terrorism, financial meltdown, ethnic cleansing, religious conflicts, class exploitations, epidemic diseases, irresponsible American imperial might. More than 1 billion people now scramble to make ends meet on less than a dollar a day. Meanwhile, the net worth of the world's 358 richest individuals equals the combined income of the world's poorest 45 per cent - some 2.3 billion people.” (Ch 6)

Selected quotes:

• “As they shifted in and out of public spaces, they were intent on accumulating rich qualitative data, grist to their ‘psychogeographical’ mill, documenting odors and tonalities of the cityscape, its unconscious rhythms and conscious melodies: ruined facades, foggy vistas of narrow, sepia-soaked streets, nettle-ridden paving stones, empty alleyways at 3am, menace and mayhem, separation and continuity.” (Ch 1)
• “If the Sacre-Coeur trampled over the legacy of the Communards, Pompidou [centre built in 1969] did likewise over the soixante-huitards.” (Ch 2)
• "The unitary city would be disruptive and playful ... it would emphasize forgotten and beleaguered nooks and crannies, mysterious corners, quiet squares, teaming neighborhoods, pavements brimming with strollers and old timers with berets sitting on park benches.” (Ch 2)
• “Humans are protean beings, desiring differentiated practice, needing meaningful and fulfilling activity.” (Ch 2)
• “Society has always rewarded mediocrity, always rewarded those who kowtow to its unfortunate laws.” (Ch 2)
• “In leisure time, workers became consumers ... private life became the domain of the advertisement ... of movie and pop stars and glamorous soap operas, of dreaming for what you already know is available, at a cost.” (Ch 3)
• “Mass consumption and commodities fill the frame and pollute the mind ... The diffuse spectacle thrives off the gadget, the gimmick, the fad. ... in accumulation for accumulation’s sake.” (Ch 3)
• “Dramatic weather patterns aren't too dissimilar to storms that break out across the economic and political landscape. Each, after all, takes place when the temperature is hottest, when the pressure dial approaches danger level. Often nobody pays attention to the inclement forecast. In such heat, wealth accumulates, business booms and stock prices grow, until, suddenly, the bubble bursts and the heavens open.” (Ch 4)
• “Truth ... becomes like storytelling; each tale is difficult to adjudicate, because everything has relative plausibility.” (Ch 5)

In the Cafe of Lost Youth, a novel by Patrick Modiano, takes its title from a line in Debord's masterpiece film ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’ (We Wander in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire)April 2025; 153 pages

A beautifully readable book about a surprisingly romantic philosophe.

Published in 2005 as part of their series of Critical Lives by Reaktion Books.

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

"Ivy: the Life of I. Compton-Burnett" by Hilary Spurling

Ivy Compton-Burnett wrote short, heavily-mannered novels. Their settings are traditional, often revolving around an upper-middle-class family in a big house, with servants. But her style was revolutionary. An early reviewer (Raymond Mortimer in the New Statesman in  1935) said: “At first sight her work strikes you as clumsy and heavy-fisted; her figures, though solid, are not what is called ‘life-like’, and she composes her books on highly defined and artificial designs. In fact, she is open to all the reproaches laid upon the founders of post-impressionism.” Natalie Sarraute (author of Tropismes and one of the pioneers of nouveau roman) ranked her with Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka. She is almost completely forgotten today.

She was born as the eldest child from the second marriage of her father, an extraordinary man who rose from humble beginnings to become England's leading homoeopathic doctor. She had five surviving half-siblings and five full-siblings; not one of the children had children of their own. She herself died an unmarried virgin (her books show an early tolerance of homosexuality but there is no evidence that she herself was a lesbian). She was educated in Hove and in Bedford before attending university at Royal Holloway College. Her first novel Dolores showed the influence of George Eliot and Victorian writers, then the First World War intervened, bringing the break up of her family home (which Ivy had ruled like a tyrant after the death of her mother), the death of favourite brother and the death by suicide of her two youngest sisters. She set up home with another woman, Margaret Jourdain, "a published poet and prose poet, an editor and essayist, translator and disciple of Baudelaire and the symbolists, as well as a regular reviewer for the literary weeklies.” who specialised in books about the decorative arts. Then, in 1925, she published Pastors and Masters and her new style was born. Over the next forty years she wrote another eighteen books. She died a Dame and widely revered by other writers such as L P Hartley (author of The Go-Between), Rosamund Lehmann (Invitation to the Waltz), Elizabeth Bowen (The Heat of the Day) and Elizabeth Taylor (Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont).  

This biography gives a real flavour of her life and places it squarely in the context of her childhood; her work is referred to wherever possible (which means that the books sometimes appear in non-chronological order). There are a lot of characters (Ivy's ten siblings, Margaret's nine - and none of them reproduced either - not to mention friends, other relations, and other writers, and I sometimes had to make notes to keep track of them all. But the book seems to manage the trick of being exhaustive while not exhausting, comprehensive while not over-detailed, thorough and yet readable. I doubt it will be read by anyone who is not one of ICB's small and dwindling number of fans, but the effort is more than worthwhile.

Selected quotes:

• “Ivy seems to have been a [page break] resolutely reticent small girl, learning early that principle of concealment which was afterwards invariably central to her theory of survival.” (Ch 2)
• "Ignorance ... enables the insensitive safely and with a good conscience to practise all forms of meanness.” (Ch 3)
• “We weren't allowed bicycles in case we will run over, we weren't allowed to swim in case we drowned, we weren't allowed to ride in case we had a fall.” (Ch 5)
• “Margaret herself sided emphatically with the spinsters in Ivy's books who are apt to reply to any suggestion that marriage might mean a fuller life: ‘ I don't want the things it would be full of’.” (Ch 11)
• "Reading ‘Elders and Betters’ was like sucking a lemon ... she often felt inclined to hurl the lemon to the far end of the room but was aware that she would have to get up and pick it up again.” (Ch 14)

October 2024; 545 pages

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

ICB Bibliography

• Dolores (1911)
• Pastors and Masters (1925)
• Brothers and Sisters (1929)
• Men and Wives (1931)
• More Women Than Men (1933)
• A House and Its Head (1935)
• Daughters and Sons (1937)
• A Family and a Fortune (1939)
• Parents and Children (1941)
• Elders and Betters (1944)
• Manservant and Maidservant (1947)
• Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949)
• Darkness and Day (1951)
• The Present and the Past (1953)
• Mother and Son (1955)
• A Father and His Fate (1957)
• A Heritage and Its History (1959)
• The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
• A God and His Gifts (1963)
• The Last and the First (posthumous, 1971)

"Orwell: The Authorised Biography" by Michael Shelden

 A biography, authorised by the literary executors, of Eric Blair who, under the pen name of George Orwell wrote, among other works:

• Animal Farm
• 1984
• Down and Out in Paris and London
• The Road to Wigan Pier
• Homage to Catalonia

Eric Blair was born in Bengal where his father was involved in selling opium under the auspices of the Indian Civil Service, an administrator for the British Raj. He went to a prep school in Eastbourne and then Eton College; he then joined the British Empire as a policeman in Burma, hated working for imperialism, and embarked on a career as a novelist and journalist for the political left wing. To further these goals he became a tramp in London and a dishwasher in Paris, he joined the republican army to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and lived in a cheap lodging house in Wigan. He adopted a baby, ran a village store in remote Hertfordshire, and lived on the Scottish island of Jura 25 miles from the nearest shop. This enormously readable biography not only chronicles the remarkable life of this unusual individual but also gives an insight into his work, both fiction and journalism. 

As with many biographies of this sort, some of the delight is in encountering other people were touched by the life of the principal. Thus, Orwell knew Cyril Connolly both at Eastbourne and Eton and in later life. He was at Eton with Steven Runciman who became an expert in the history of Constantinople. As a young man, Orwell worked as a private tutor to, among others, Richard Peters who became Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of London, one of my alma maters. His second wife had been the lover of Lucian Freud. I love this sort of thing: within seven steps I can link myself to Sigmund Freud ...

Selected quotes:

• "St Cyprian's appears to have been a prison camp cunningly disguised as a top-notch, expensive preparatory school." (Ch 2)
• "He regards the loss of self-respect as a fate worse than poverty. In his eyes beggars are contemptible only if they come to share society's contempt for them." (Ch 9)
• "It is clearly past any hope of reform when the empire-builders are reduced to fighting over who has the right to kick the butler - completely ignoring the question of whether anyone should have that right in the first place." (Ch 10)
• "What Orwell is describing is ... the use of a dual perspective to bring into intimate contact two normally separate worlds." (Ch 10)
• "'Every book is a failure', he remarked in later years, but as soon as one 'failure' was complete, he could not wait to go on to write the next, always unsatisfied, always in doubt about his talent but always intent on doing his work better." (Ch 10)
• "A shilling was deducted from the man's pay whenever a fellow miner was killed - the money was contributed to a fund for the widow - but this deduction, or 'stoppage' occurred with such grim regularity that the company used a rubber stamp marked 'Death stoppage' to make the notation on the pay checks." (Ch 12)
• "The poor in Marrakech ... are, of course, all too visible, with their rags and outstretched hands, their physical afflictions, their corpses. But Orwell knows that these conditions exist because the colonial powers who could improve them have chosen not to see them." (Ch 15)
• "The one serious defect in the novel [Coming Up For Air] is Orwell's attempt to be the voice of his narrator-protagonist. He does not make a convincing middle-aged, overweight, suburban-dwelling, low-brow insurance salesman." (Ch 16)
• "Orwell finds numerous examples in Dickens's work of significant flaws - the cloying sentimentality, the over-reliance on character types, the superficial understanding of commercial and industrial work, the hopelessly unrealistic endings, the avoidance of genuine tragedy." (Ch 16)
• "Connolly wrote a short piece about a love affair between a young man and a woman in a totalitarian state headed by 'Our Leader', whose face looks down on people from neon signs high above the streets. The young man is arrested for treason, tortured by officials from the Censor's Department and forced into approving his death sentence." (Ch 17)
• "For most writers the use of slang or other informal expressions creates dangerous pitfalls, tempting them to be too casual in the construction of sentences." (Ch 18)
• "There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin." (Ch 18)
• "The philistines are determined to deny the independence of artistic vision, while it defenders are just as determined to exalt it beyond the reach of criticism." (Ch 20) Orwell wanted to be able to defend an artist's art while still admitting that the artist themselves might be an obnoxious specimen of humanity.
• "He wanted to establish just the right tone for the novel, and he wanted to show in the very style of his own prose how much would be lost in a future world dominated by the impoverished vocabulary of Newspeak." (Ch 22)
• "There must be time for wandering among old churchyards and making the perfect cup of tea and balancing caterpillars on a stick and falling in love. All these things are derided as sentimental and trivial by intellectuals ... but they are the things which form the real texture of a life." (Ch 22)

That rare biography which is at once comprehensive, and easy-to-read and offers a good insight into its subject. May 2024; 489 pages

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

"William Shakespeare: his life and work" by Anthony Holden

 

A competent biography of the celebrated playwright. Much of the details I already knew. What this book adds is a (slightly speculative) suggestion that Shakespeare was a closet-Catholic in his youth, having lived in a Catholic household in Lancashire during the 'lost years' when he was young. I also hugely enjoyed the very start of chapter one in which Holden roundly trashes the "usually snobbish attempts" to deny that Shakespeare was the author of the plays via conspiracy theories that must assume that Ben Jonson and Robert Greene and Will Kemp and King James I all lied when naming Shakespeare as a playwright/actor/shareholder. 

While one can always quibble with anybody about the chronology of the plays (eg the BBC recently put Titus Andronicus first, as a collaboration with George Peele, while Holden gives primacy to Henry VI), this book is a useful reference for sources; it is both scholarly and well written.

A useful addition to the canon. Other works about Shakespeare reviewed in this blog can be found on this page.

November 2023; 328 pages

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

"The Scoundrel Harry Larkyns" by Rebecca Gowers

The subtitle of this biography is "and his pitiless killing by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge" and the cover shows a sequence of photographs, in the style of the famous pioneer photographer Muybridge, which show a man being shot. These are what the author is using to 'hook' the reader. But the killing itself only happens at the 75% mark and the book is already half-over before Muybridge even makes an appearance. In this situation, I sometimes feel disappointed. But this book is an exception because the early life of Larkins/ Larkyns is so interesting.

He was born Harry Larkins in India; his father was in the military wing of the East India Company. Aged 4 months his family went home on leave to England; they left him behind aged three when they returned to India. He never saw them again. Contact was limited to letters: his mother regularly told him to be good. Harry was orphaned at the age of thirteen when his parents were killed during the Indian Rebellion ('Indian Mutiny') of 1857. Almost immediately he was sent to a cheap boarding school in Belgium and later Wimbledon.

With few prospects, at the age of sixteen, Harry pulled a few strings to become an officer cadet with the newly nationalised East India Company army, serving in, eventually, seven regiments. Like most officers, he lived beyond his salary and got into debt. And trouble. He was 'permitted to resign' and returned to London aged 23. 

In London he continued his extravagant lifestyle. Aged 25 he went to Paris, staying in the Grand Hotel, going to the theatre and wooing courtesans. He funded this by buying jewellery on credit or with fraudulent bankers' drafts and then pawning it. He was arrested and throne into prison but at the subsequent court case he managed to persuade his friends to cough up for him and talked himself into an acquittal. He then returned to London ... and more or less repeated the same dodge with the same consequences ... and again talked himself out of trouble. 

Aged 26, Harry returned to France to sign up with the 'franc-tireurs', an international troop of guerrilla fighters who fought for the French during the Franco-Prussian war. This was where he finally shone. He clearly enjoyed the hardships and the dangers and meeting Garibaldi. He ended up with the rank of Major (technically its French equivalent) and the Legion d'Honneur. Harry became the model for one of the young heroes of The Young Francs-Tireurs by G A Henty. 

Harry then went to San Francisco where, following yet another court case over a debt he incurred, probably by fraud, he became a journalist in the town which was still expanding from the aftermath of the Gold Rush (now diversifying into silver and mercury mining). He worked for Henry George, radical economist and author of Progress and Poverty, as a hugely popular theatre reviewer and columnist. He also met Eadweard Muybridge and, more particularly, Flora his wife. He wanted to run away with Flora after she had given birth to a son whom Harry believed to be his but Muybridge discovered the affair and shot and killed Harry. Harry died a few minuted before his 31st birthday. 

Muybridge was then acquitted at the trial by the jury on the (wholly extra-legal) grounds that he was defending his honour.

The story of this young man who packed so much into his nearly thirty-one years is told clearly and with verve; I found it rattled along.

Selected quotes:

• "With notable poetic justice, Bagot had just died on a tiger-hunting expedition after his cook accidentally made breakfast chupatties using the arsenic meant for curing the animal skins." (Ch 4)
• "Frederick Hankey, infamous pornographer, unkindly described as 'a second de Sade without the intellect'." (Ch 7)
• "Pixley was 'furiously sincere', and something of a kangaroo: 'you never know which way he is going to jump'." (Ch 9)
• "When a reporter wrote that Woodhull had made him blush a joke went around that he had been 'promptly discharged' from his job for 'conduct unbecoming to a journalist'." (Ch 13)

Great fun and packed with incident. Names dropped include (as well as those above) Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and William Gladstone.

October 2023; 310 pages

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

"Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl" by Carl Rollyson

This is a biography of the journalist and novelist Rebecca West. It's one of those biographies that seeks to chronicle every aspect of the subject's life, and it is a literary biography that carefully describes each book she wrote. As a fellow novelist, what really interests me about a writer is not whom they have sex with or where they lived but about how they worked, what they saw as 'good' and 'bad' writing, their literary influences, and how (and why) their art matured as they grew older. This book manages this to a certain extent (more than many others) but I was a little overwhelmed by all the rest of the stories. Though some were fun.

My overall impression of Cicely Fairfield who named herself 'Rebecca West' after a feisty Ibsen heroine is that I wouldn't have liked her very much. She was likened by her niece to a firework: great fun but rather dangerous. This was a woman who took no hostages. She had forthright opinions and was able to express them in pithy and often unforgettable prose but I doubt she was ever very charitable. She believed (and I suspect she took pleasure in the notion) that she rendered some of her lovers impotent. Her relationship with her son (whom she packed off to boarding school when he was three) showed minimal understanding, little kindness and a lot of mutual anger. And yet this is the woman who wrote The Return of the Soldier, a novel that has compassion at its very heart (though not, perhaps, for Kitty). 

One characteristic which is shared, I imagine, with many novelists, is that “Rebecca could not tell a story without exaggerating, or as some would have it, lying.” (Rebecca West: a Portrait)

Her childhood was the classic late Victorian one of genteel poverty. Her father abandoned the family when she was eight or nine and died when she was thirteen after which her mother typed theses for a living but managed to put three girls through school (though Rebecca was clearly a challenging student) although they subsisted on a “dreary diet of bread and butter, porridge and eggs and milk.” 

Politically she was a suffragette and a very early feminist. But her iconoclastic approach meant that she was often regarded as a rather renegade socialist. She believed from its start that the Soviet Union would prove authoritarian and she considered pacificism naive. “Do you believe that you are going to abolish Cancer if you get 100,000 people to sign a pledge that they do not intend to have Cancer?” (Ch 18) Neither view endeared her to the comrades.

She is perhaps best known for her affair with the much older H G Wells which resulted (on the day that Britain joined the First World War) in an illegitimate son who later became the novelist Anthony West. Although HG was a notorious adulterer (at the funeral of one of his mistresses, "Rebecca is supposed to have turned to [another of his mistresses] Odette and remarked, ‘Well, I guess we can all move one up’.”), she seems to have made much of the running and they seemed to have been in love for ten years, even though he never left his wife. She also had affairs with, among many others, Max Beaverbrook and Charlie Chaplin. In  her eighties she responded to Warren Beatty asking her about her sex life by telling him: "I have some time free on Thursday afternoons."

Her husband was an (apparently financially incompetent) banker who had numerous affairs and was, in later life, a really bad driver. 

She travelled in pre-WW2 Yugoslavia; perhaps her best book is a thinly fictionalised account of her travels there. During WW2 she hosted Yugoslav exiles and refugees at her farmhouse. Following that war she covered the Nuremberg trials and wrote a book analysing the nature of treason when covering the controversial trial of Law Haw Haw.

In later life she repeatedly fell out with her son and other members of her family, and with her friends, and with her staff. Given that she was born in the nineteenth century, it was wonderful to discover that she enjoyed watching Star Trek and that she had to be evacuated because she lived next door to the Iranian Embassy when it was occupied by terrorists. She was born before powered air flight, before commercial radio broadcasts and before television. Some lives experience so much change. 

There was much to enjoy in this biography but there was too much detail. I didn't need to hear about every visit she made to her son and his family. I would have preferred a better focused, broader brush approach.

Selected quotes: 

• “She provided vivid portraits of the defendants such as Goering, whose soft, feminine, and sometimes humorous qualities reminded Rebecca of a madam in a brothel.” (Ch 25)
• “Henry thought of himself as a gentleman farmer and liked to give guests the benefit of his agricultural knowledge, which in fact was negligible.” (Ch 34)
• “She was against censorship, but she objected to literature that had no moral standard” (Ch 34)
• “Dr. Stephan Ward, she concluded, represented a society that used women as commodities. Look at the way he had taken home a prostitute simply because he had spotted her standing next to a cigarette machine, Rebecca emphasized, ‘two machines standing side by side, waiting for custom’.” (Ch 34)
• “For her, dialogue, much more than description, revealed character. In her Sunday Telegraph reviews she chided novelists such as Iris Murdoch for talking too much about their characters rather than letting them talk.” (Ch 36)
• “She calmed herself by watching television, finding a ‘nice idiotic’ episode of Star Trek” (Ch 39)
• “On 30 April 1980, at about eleven a.m., April Edwards happened to look out of Rebecca’s big picture windows, which had a view of the back of the Iranian embassy. In the garden, a man was lying on his stomach with a gun in his hand.” (Ch 41)

October 2023

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

"Sir Charles Dilke: A Victorian Tragedy" by Roy Jenkins

This is one of those biographies which seems to be intended for a select readership: those who are already in the know. Roy Jenkins has written a book which demands at least a working knowledge of the personalities and politics of late-19th century Britain. He's a bit better when his hero goes abroad but he doesn't explain who, for example, the Prince Imperial is. He compounds the mystery by quoting chunks of foreign Language, usually French, without translation. Books should be about communication and I would have thought that Mr Jenkins as a well-known and successful politician would be a great communicator. Perhaps he thinks I read French. Perhaps he doesn't want me to understand. Perhaps he has written this book purely for his own amusement.

Sir Charles Dilke was a Victorian with a baronetcy and a private income who became a Liberal MP, on the radical wing of the party, and soon attained Cabinet rank under Prime Minister Gladstone. He was then named as a co-respondent in a divorce case and, despite his name being apparently cleared, was judged by the establishment to be guilty. He lost his position, he lost his influence, and he lost his seat (although after some time being ostracised by society in general he got another constituency which he represented as a back-bencher to the end of his life).  

Of course it was the scandal that prompted me to read the book and I wasn't prepared for wading through the masses of biographical detail about his early life and his gradual gaining of political influence. As I say above, to properly appreciate what was going on you need to have a decent understanding of late Victorian politics. I don't, so most of the names passed me by in a blur.

Even when I recognise a name, it seems that Jenkins wants to try to keep me in the dark. He mentions Leslie Stephen as a influence on Dilke at Cambridge University without telling us that this man was the father of Virginia Woolf. (He does tell us that Dilke's second wife was, in an earlier marriage, thought to be the model for Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch.)

By now I'm bored.

Then come the court case(s). Jenkins trawls through the testimony. There's a lot of detail. Too much. I drown. More of a blur.

Even when we get to the chapter that suggests there might have been a conspiracy, every little thing is told to us. There is no smoking gun. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence. There are hints that could be used to suggest theories but Jenkins fails to draw out any generalities from the stodgy mass of evidence. He is too serious a scholar to speculate.

What did I learn? Little, except that Queen Victoria meddled in government far more than is generally allowed. 

Selected quotes:

• "He thought a thirty-mile walk the most agreeable way of passing a quiet Sunday afternoon, and he was known on occasion to walk from Cambridge to London during the day, attend a dinner in the evening, and walk back during the night." (Ch 1) It is over fifty miles from Cambridge to London; Google reckons that would take twenty hours. To do it in ten hours would require a walking speed of five miles per hour which is scarcely credible. Has anybody ever checked this 'fact'?
• "He had a horror of 'soft' climates and of the easy, purposeless living to which he thought they gave rise. The banana, the most typical product of such a climate, he regarded with particular horror." (Ch 2)
• "Stanley, the explorer, came on one occasion, but he struck Dilke as 'brutal, bumptious, and untruthful." (Ch 4) This autobiography of Stanley makes it clear that he was exceptionally brutal and a pathological liar.
• "He possessed to an unusual degree the essential ingredients of moral intolerance - he was a puritan fascinated by sex." (Ch 12)
• "The Congo Free State, under the personal suzerainty of the King of the Belgians ... was intended to be a spearhead of civilisation in Central Africa. By the middle of the 'nineties, however, the spear looked somewhat blunted. Slave dealing persisted and the army of the Free State ... had been fed for long periods by means of a system of organised cannibalism." (Ch 18) Another fact that might need checking.
• "In these later years he much enjoyed going to plays in Paris, but however satisfying he found the performance he always left after the first act. He was not bored, but thought that one act of a play was enough." (Ch 19)

Jenkins says that the speeches the Dilke made in the House of Commons were typified by by very long and lacking in oratory but thoroughly thorough, full of facts and evidence. This biography is much the same. There are a lot of facts (though I think some needed treating rather more sceptically) but the overall impression is one of tedium.

October 2023; 418 pages

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