"Strange Angel" by George Pendle

 This is a biography of American rocket pioneer Jack Parsons, whose actual first name was Marvel.

Inspired by science fiction, Parsons dreamed of constructing a rocket that would travel to the moon. But this was in the 1930s, after his wealthy grandparents had lost their fortune in the Wall Street crash and his privileged upbringing on Orange Grove Avenue ('millionaire's row') in Pasadena had come to an end. And, at the time, when aeroplanes were still in their glamorous infancy, rocketry did not exist outside a handful of amateur eccentrics. 

Not being able to afford a university education, Parsons began working in explosives for mining companies. Then he teamed up with schoolfriend Ed Forman, who was an engineer equally lacking in tertiary qualifications, and maths graduate Frank Molina, to persuade CalTech professor Theodore von Karman (an aerodynamicist who had explained the collpase of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge) to let them use CalTech facilities to test rocket motors, although they still had to fund the experiments themselves. They began working with the military who wanted to add jets to help bombers achieve take-off speeds on shorter runways. But they had problems with the powder fuel: there were always cracks between the clumps of powder grain so burning was uneven. After watching workmen laying molten asphalt on a road, Parsons made his breakthrough and turned the powder into tar which could be poured into the rocket engines. The 'Suicide Squad' founded NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the company Aerojet which still sends rockets into outer space.

Parsons was increasingly interested in magic and became the leader of the Agape Lodge in LA, a group following the Thelema teachings of occultist Aleister Crowley (whose biography Do What Thou Wilt by Lawrence Smith I read recently). Parsons moved the group to a large house on Orange Grove Avenue which he had bought and began performing sex magick ceremonies. According to this book, L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, moved in and stole Parsons's girlfirend (but Parsons, psychologically dominated by Hubbard, put up with it). In the end it all went wrong and Parsons, having lost most of his money in a failed business venture with Hubbard, went back to making explosives. He blew himself up.

This was a brilliantly written book. I loved the way it clothed its story, by telling us the background: LA in the 1920s, a mix of “evangelists like Aimee Semple McPherson ... performing exorcisms over the new medium of radio ... while the social campaigner and writer Upton Sinclair was arrested for reading the First Amendment of the United States Constitution (the right to freedom of expression) in public." (Prologue). The core rocketeers, a group of young men, working like dogs and risking their lives for their passion, seem just like the young geeks who founded Google and facebook and Microsoft and the other IT start-ups of the internet revolution, or like rock musicians hoping to be big. And the 'also starring' cast has a host of other names such as Suicide Squad members Apollo Smith whose father had given his sisters the names Diana and Athena, his brothers the names Hermes and Orpheus, and the dog was called Cerberus and Tsien who “was descended from the tenth-century emperor Qian Liu Tsien", science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein, E E 'Doc' Smith, L Sprague de Camp and L Ron Hubbard, Jack Cornog who first isolated tritium, and  rocket pioneer Robert Goddard who lived in Roswell, New Mexico, 

Selected quotes:

• “John Whiteside Parsons had gone from being a young genius dead before his time to the most overworked, hackneyed, science fiction cliche of them all." (Prologue)
• “The world is drowning - that is exactly why it will clutch at a straw.” (Ch 6, quoting Crowley)
• “Magic, like science, was an attempt to control events by performing technical acts.” (Ch 6)
• “Bob Cornog remembered stumbling into Parsons’ room one morning to find Hubbard and Betty entwined, ‘like a starfish on a clam’.” (Ch 11)
• “The Parsonage, as it had come to be called, had briefly been an adult playground saturated with philosophical hopes and pungent romanticism, fruit brandies and fencing, bohemians and scientists, poetry and rockets.” (Ch 11)

A fascinating story told by a born storyteller.

June 2026; 307 pages
First published in the USA by Harcourt in 2005
My paperback edition was issued in the UK by Weidenfield and Nicholson in 2006

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Introducing Swedenborg" by Peter Ackroyd

 

This is a miniature biography of a complex man, a Swedish mining engineer who became a member of their House of Lords and, following a series of visions, a mystic theologian and philosopher. Swedenborg  frequently travelled to London (he died there) and attended lectures given by Isaac Newton, studied with astronomers John Flamsteed and Edmund Halley. He published Sweden's first scientific journal and was the cousin of Carl Linnaeus. He corresponded with Kant and John Wesley. His conversations with angels remind one of William Blake. He wrote loads of books.

This tiny biography can't hope to do justice to its subject in 64 pages, but it's an admirably well-written start.

Selected quotes:

• "He realized that by breathing slowly he was able to better concetnrate and understand." (p 4)
• "How did the infinite, which is not material and is not defined by time or space, give rise to the finite? He posits the existence of a number of points without dimension, which emerge from the infinite and which are the cause of matter." (pp 8 - 9)
• "He tried to elucidate his thoughts by means of a series of steps from lower to higher which he called 'correspondences'. This was an occult maxim which had been used elsewhere, namely 'that which is above is like that which is below'." (p 13)
• "Writing in the highest heaven consists of curves and distinct forms; good is distributed through the vowels 'u', 'o' and 'a' while truth is conveyed by 'e' and 'i'." (p 34)
• "Some angels are naked because nakedness corresponds with innocence." (p 39)
• "All those in hell 'are ruled by means of their fears' ... Each person believes that they act through their own choice; so it is that a person is the cause of their own evil and so casts themself 'into hell from death'." (p 40)
• "Socinians rejected the divinity of Christ and thus the existence of the Trinity." (p 57)

Peter Ackroyd is a novelist who also writes biographies, particularly of people associated with London.

Novels by Peter Ackroyd

• The Great Fire of London (1982)
• The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) 
• Hawksmoor (1985)
• Chatterton (1987) 
• First Light (1989)
• English Music (1992) 
• The House of Doctor Dee (1993)
• Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994)
• Milton in America (1996)
• The Plato Papers: A Prophecy (1999)
• The Clerkenwell Tales (2003)
• The Lambs of London (2004)
• The Fall of Troy (2006)
• The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008)
• The Canterbury Tales – A Retelling (2009)
• The Death of King Arthur: The Immortal Legend – A Retelling (2010)
• Three Brothers (2013)

Non-fiction by Peter Ackroyd

• Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism (1976)
• Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag, the History of an Obsession (1979)
• Ezra Pound and His World (1980)
• T. S. Eliot (1984)
• Dickens' London: An Imaginative Vision (1987)
• Dickens (1990)
• Introduction to Dickens (1991)
• Blake (1995)
• The Life of Thomas More (1998)
• London: The Biography (2000)
• Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion (2002)
• Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002)
• The Beginning (2003)
• Illustrated London (2003)
• Escape From Earth (2004)
• Ancient Egypt (2004)
• Shakespeare: The Biography (2005)
• Ancient Greece (2005)
• Ancient Rome (2005)
• Thames: Sacred River (2007)
• Coffee with Dickens (with Paul Schlicke) (2008)
• Venice: Pure City (2009)
• The English Ghost: Spectres Through Time (2010)
• London Under (2011)
• The History of England, v.1 Foundation (2011)
• The History of England, v.2 Tudors (2012)
• The History of England, v.3 Civil War (2014)
• Alfred Hitchcock (2015)
• The History of England, v.4 Revolution (2016)
• Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day (2017)
• The History of England, v.5 Dominion (2018)
• The History of England, v.6 Innovation (2021)
• Introducing Swedenborg (2021) 
• The Colours of London (2022)
• The English Actor: From Medieval to Modern (2023)
• The English Soul: Faith of a Nation (2024)
• Forgotten London: Exploring the Hidden Life of the City (2025)

Ackroyd's Brief Lives

• Chaucer (2004)
• J.M.W. Turner (2006)
• Newton (2008)
• Poe: A Life Cut Short (2008)
• Wilkie Collins: A Brief Life (2012)
• Charlie Chaplin: A Brief Life (2014)

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Do What Thou Wilt" by Aleister Crowley

 

A biography of Aleister Crowley, creator of the Thelema rite of ceremonial magic, dubbed by the British press: the most evil man in the world.

He was born in 1875; his father was a Plymouth Brethren preacher who died when Aleister was 11. The boy was eventually inherit sufficient money not to need to work, but he spent his fortune pursuing his dreams: mountaineering (he attempted Kanchenjunga), poetry (almost all through paid-for publishing) and magic. Throughout his life he had sex, sometimes under the guise of sexual magic, with both male and female partners, fathering at least three daughters, two of whom died very young, and a son. His publications included erotic verse and books of magic. He founded the religion of Thelema whose motto was 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law' and set up a temple on Sicily where he would instruct disciples until he was banished by Mussolini's police.

In some ways, the man's life is summarised on page 2: “A spoiled scion of a wealthy Victorian family, who embodied many of the worst John Bull racial and social prejudices of his upper class contemporaries, a blisteringly arrogant opportunist who took financial and psychological advantage of his admirers, an unadmiring and even vicious judge of most of his contemporaries, a sensualist who relished sex in all forms, a hubristic experiment in drugs who was addicted to heroin for the last twenty-five years of his life.”

The problem with writing a biography of a man like this is that the reader quickly becomes wearied of the details of yet another sexual partner, yet another magical rite, and yet another publication. Oh, he's fallen out with somebody else. The book itself didn't make things better by the use of long chapters whose contents were sometimes so diverse that I wondered whether they had a theme, other than covering another few years of Crowley's life. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing was the long list of people I would have thought respectable who participated in magical rites (and sometimes had sex) with him. He was involved with the mystical order of the Golden Dawn, of which Yeats was also a member. One of his big mates Allan Bennett (another one) went on to become a Buddhist monk and edited the journal of the International Buddhist society. Frederick Charles Fuller was “one of the premier military theorists of all time” yet befriended Crowley for four years (though he was eecentric, later joining the British Union of Fascists, and attending Hitler’s 50th birthday celebrations in April 1939). Victor Neuberg, disciple and gay partner, later became a literary reviewer and discovered Dylan Thomas. Other acquaintances included Dennis Wheatley, Dion Fortune, Tom Driberg and Somerset Maugham (who based his novel 'The Magician' on Crowley.

The most shocking moment came when he was the leader of the Kanchenjunga expedition and three climbers, together with three porters mutinied and left camp. On the descent they triggered an avalanche which buried and killed one of the climbers and all three porters. The next day Crowley left the mountain, passing the ongoing rescue attempts without offering his help, and returned to England. The letters he wrote to the papers to justify himself led to widespread condemnation and the end of his mountaineering career. 

He died in a guesthouse in Hastings.

There is one mistake, I think. The Book of Four, published as a square, was priced at four groats. Sutin mistakenly equates this to a shilling but a groat was 4d and therefore 4 groats = 1/4d.

Selected quotes: 

• “I reached a point where my physical reflection in a mirror became faint and flickering. It gave very much the effect of the interrupted images of the cinematograph in its early days. ... “the real secret of invisibility is not concerned with the laws of optics at all; the trick is to prevent people noticing you when they would normally do so.” (Ch 3)
• “The assignment of a governing true will to an entire gender seems to contradict the sense of self-discovery that lies at the heart of Thelema.” (132)
• “The aged god Saturn can only counsel despair; Jupiter is impotent; Mars is beset by lust and lacking in wisdom; Apollo the Sun is slain because he cannot harmonize the good and even natures that battle within him; Venus lovingly mourns Apollo but her sorrow lacks redemptive force; Mercury possesses the seeds of magical wisdom, but he can no longer server psychopomp to humankind.” (Ch 6) 
• “The psychological task of concluding his ‘Autohagiography’ ... must have been severe. he had lost both his Abbey and his reputation and no longer had a publisher for the massive work on which he laboured. The tone of the ‘Confessions’ reveals none of this - throughout, it is all but unremitting in its braggadocio.” (Ch 9)
• “Magick is the Science and Art of Causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” (Ch 9)

February 2026; 419 pages

Published by St Martin's Press, New York

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Elizabeth Gaskell" by Jenny Uglow

A biography of the Victorian novelist and biographer whose work includes Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1851 - 3), North and South (1853 - 4), and The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857).

It's a hugely detailed biography. You learn a lot about her family (and it sometimes strays into side anecdotes about her connections) and an exhausting amount about the holidays she went on repeatedly (her husband's congregation "muttered that the minister’s wife took an uncommon number of holidays”; Ch 26) usually abroad with her kids but without her husband; he often went on solitary walking tours as soon as she returned). Each of the novels is also carefully described and the links between her life and the plot demonstrated. As a scholarly tome it is therefore a magnificent resource ... but I found it rather too detail-heavy to be an enjoyable read. Nevertheless, I shall hang onto it and as I read her novels I shall refer to it; I am sure that for this it shall prove useful.

Selected quotes:

• “One thing is pretty clear, Women, must give up living an artist’s life, if home duties are to be paramount. It is different with men, whose home duties are so small a part of their life.” (Ch 2)
• “Everyone has a multiple life to some degree and each self has its own story, the narratives flowing together, separate yet overlapping, like threads in a weave. Elizabeth Gaskell’s life and writing were such a woven cloth, the surface highly patterned and brightly coloured, but the web on the underside darker, subdued and tangled." (Ch 5)
• “From the beginning Gaskell’s stance was both radical and feminist, and she continued all her life to make use of these Gothic conventions to link the cruel repression of wives and daughters to the pressure of history and the patriarchal power of the aristocracy, in contrast to the tenderness of women” (Ch 6)
• “Gaskell believed that much of the harshness of society could be overcome if men would only free the feminine side of their nature.” (Ch 6)
• “Again and again she shows characters progressing from guilt, misery or self-obsession, through love (or sympathetic identification with another) to positive involvement with the whole community.” (Ch 7)
• “Within her fiction lies are a major cause of psychic crises. Often these untruths are not wilful inventions, but ‘white lies’ forced on people to cover up the truth” (Ch 12)
• “The early stages establish the milieu, the characters and their way of life until at some central point narrative itself takes over. From that point on ‘truth’ is displayed not in realism or analysis but in the symbolic workings of the plot.” (Ch 12)
• “Gaskell refuses to accept that the common is necessarily commonplace.” (Ch 24)
• “She could be stubborn, prejudiced, overwhelming and erratic, but people forgave her because she was so clearly involved.” (Ch 28)

October 2025

First published in 2010

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

"Peter of Savoy: The Little Charlemagne" by John Marshall

Pevensey Castle: Barbara van Cleve, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

A biography of the uncle of Eleanor, the Queen of King Henry III of England, who built a palace on the Strand in London where the Savoy hotel now stands.

Henry III had a long but troubled reign. He inherited the throne from his father King John in the middle of a baronial revolt and French invasion. He was forced to re-concede the Magna Carta and, later in his reign, cede absolute rule to a council of barons headed by his arch-enemy and brother-in-law Simon de Montfort. 

Pierre de Savoie, was the younger son of Thomas I, Count of Savoy. His sister's children included four daughters who, at some time, became queens: of France, of England, of the Romans and of Sicily. Pierre spent some of his time in Savoy where he ruled lands that later became the French-speaking cantons of Switzerland, and some time in England, trying to secure the succession of his sister's son, Lord Edward, who would eventually become Edward I of England. He was part of a wave of Savoyards who held offices under Henry III (his brother Boniface became Archbishop of Canterbury) eventually leading to a wave of xenophobia that helped Simon de Montfort gain power over Henry. 

This biography chronicles Pierre's life and traces the far-reaching consequences. 

It is clear that, as is common with biographers, the author hero-worships his subject. Nothing he does is viewed in anything but a positive light. Matthew Paris, the chronicler, a key primary source, is repeatedly castigated as biased and xenophobic. Simon de Montfort, whose influence on English politics can scarcely be denied, is depicted as self-serving and villainous, principally for having the temerity to challenge a king.

But my principal criticism of this book is the number of times I found it confusing. One expects difficulties when records are ambiguous or incomplete and when several people are named the same (for example, both Henry III and his brother Richard of Cornwall had a son called Edmund), but a good historian should resolve these problems. Instead, I found Marshall added to them. For example:

• “In 1229, at Lausanne, Pierre began a career that would lead eventually to being one of a council ruling England and Count of Savoy, under the tutelage of the provost, Conon d’Estavayer” who had been educated at Paris. (p 14). The final part of the sentence doesn't make it clear whether the tutelage was in Lausanne or England. Furthermore, the data of 1229 is contradicted on the next page when he is recorded as a canon in Nov 1226.
• “One of his tasks concerned Englishmen of the locale who had not been to church within the prescribed forty days, something that will no doubt have made him popular.” (pp 26 - 27) But we aren't told what he did nor  nor why this action should have made him popular. Perhaps it's irony.
• On page 41 I became very confused as to exactly where Richmond and its castle were, given that three roads are mentioned and two castles; I resorted to Google Maps.
• On page 45 the author lists the Cinque Ports. He says there are five, he names six. A little research suggested that in Pierre's time there were 7.

There were other examples. I ought to be able to read a history without having to resort to Google and wikipedia to clear things up.

In addition, on page 167 Marshall repeats the description of the London cook shop and London’s trade already quoted on pp 72 - 73. This looks suspiciously like padding. 

There's a great deal of interest in this book; it was a fascinating chapter in the political history of England. But the writing detracted from the reading experience.

Selected quotes:

• “In England the genie was out of the bottle; many had rather liked the idea that the king ruled with the consent of his people.” (Ch 8)

September 2025; 188 pages plus extensive appendices and notes

Published in 2023 by Pen and Sword History

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

"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)