My review of The House of Mitford, by Jonathan Guinness with Catherine Guinness

The House of Mitford

by Jonathan Guinness with Catherine Guinness

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

After this sitting considerably far down my Mitford history reading list, I was taken by its erudition. My expectations were cynical, knowing it was penned by family insiders: author Jonathon Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne, is the eldest son of Diana Mosley (née Mitford) by her first husband Bryan Guinness; his co-author is his daughter the Hon. Catherine Guinness. My tainted expectations could not have been wider off the mark.

Not only is there a marked absence of family bias, but the wordsmithing outshines every Mitford biography I have read. He does his forebears proud, his craftsmanship a testament to this clever bloodline. His being schooled at Eton and Oxford, one might expect this standard, but others with similar academic foundations have produced less impressive works.

I did not find, as certain readers have implied, any pro-Conservative slant to the narrative (the author was a Conservative Party Parliamentary Candidate). Wary of rightwing undertones, I here found objectivity from start to finish. Graced with impartiality, the content may stop short of censuring history's political right, which is not tantamount to partisanship.

I did sense, in certain of Jonathon Guinness's references to his novelist aunt Nancy Mitford, subtle retributory tones on behalf of his mother Diana who spent most of WWII in prison partly thanks to Nancy. That history, well documented by all Mitford biographers, goes like this:

After leaving her first husband for British Union of Fascists leader Sir Oswald Mosley, Diana spent time in Germany with Hitler and his inner-circle in the prelude to WWII, aiming for a Nazi-approved radio station for the BUF which never eventuated. When Mosely was imprisoned early in the war under 18B as a potentially dangerous person, Diana was initially left to do much of his bidding on the outside. Nancy was summoned by MI5 to comment on how 'dangerous' she thought her younger sister. Putting patriotic duty before blood, Nancy said she thought Diana 'highly dangerous', swaying the government's decision to lock up Diana too. Separated from her babies, Diana was accordingly detained without charge or trial for years, subject to the horrors of Holloway Jail. Diana never learned of this sisterly betrayal until late in life and Mosley never learned of it.

So, one could understand any tinge of injustice felt on his mother's behalf by this author, who as a youngster witnessed her long imprisonment. Yet this is barely evident, if only hinted at (how much of the text his co-author daughter Catherine contributed is unclear).

The telling of Mosley's career itself is presented minus the fascist-bashing righteousness of many, from a rational 'setting-the-record-straight' standpoint. That seems fair considering the author is Mosley's stepson. It carries no hint of the fascist apologist we might anticipate. 

(Prior to this book, after Mosley's death his birth son from his first marriage to Lady Cynthia Mosley, Nicholas Mosley, had written harsh volumes against his fascist father, for which Mosley's widow Diana never forgave her stepson.)

I confess to being least taken by the convoluted earlier histories and lineages of the Mitford sisters' two grandfathers, Algernon Freeman-Mitford ('Barty') and Thomas Gibson-Bowles. Even so these are more impeccably detailed than any other Mitford historian's efforts I've encountered.  

To call this author's archival prowess masterly is a gross understatement. This book, Mitford descendants can keep in stately libraries and others can consult through the mists of time. I wish I had read this particular Mitford history sooner as it surpasses all others. 

With Jonathon Guinness in his mid-nineties as I write this review of a book published forty years ago, there still feels to be some carryover from these remarkable sisters, all now long dead.    

A self-proclaimed Mitford aficionado, I now see this as the definitive biography of this canon.

My review of Honey Trap, by Anthony Summers and Steve Dorril

Honey Trap

by Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

The Profumo affair – one of Cold War Britain’s most famous political scandals – is an indelible flash in my early childhood. Framed by so many vivid, epochal images of my formative years, this fiasco became a defining mark of my generation. For this reason, reading Honey Trap was an irresistible lure down memory lane. 

A neighbour passed on to me the browned and curling paperback, which he had scored for fifty cents in a leisurely browse through our local op shop. Two distinct passages of time come into play here: the twenty-five years approx. between the events the book covers and its publication, and the thirty years between its publication and my getting around to reading it. As if two lifetimes divide the present from the story of Honey Trap. 

This staggered chronological detachment sets an intriguing and reflective context from which to revisit the scandal, which saw Britain's War Minister John Profumo and Soviet Embassy naval attaché cum spy Yevgeny Ivanov sleeping with the same woman, 19-year-old Christine Keeler. The affair's exposure and alleged resulting friendship between Profumo and Ivanov forced Profumo’s 1963 resignation from Government. 

As with other such investigative books, I saw the movie it inspired ('Scandal' 1989) long before reading this. Sir John Hurt stars as sleazy but lovable Establishment scapegoat, bon-vivant Dr Stephen Ward, who introduced the lethal Profumo affair trio and was later hounded to suicide. Sir Ian McKellen plays disgraced War Minister John Profumo. Joanne Whalley is showgirl-turned unwitting spy mistress Christine Keeler, with Bridget Fonda shining as Keeler's sharp cohort Mandy Rice-Davies. Authentic '60s & '70s glamour puss Britt Ekland is fellow seductress Mariella Novotny. Veteran screen legend Leslie Phillips graces the project as Conservative hack Lord Astor. Its haunting soundtrack includes the delectable Dusty Springfield/Pet Shop Boys hit 'Nothing Has Been Proved'. 

The movie's scenes, paired with the original media events they depicted, replayed through my visual memory as I turned each moldy page in wonderment, sneezing at the confetti of dust sprinkling my pillow yet compelled to pursue this nostalgic trip, kept awake into the small hours of three gruelling, impetuous nights.

As per its genre, Honey Trap is more a gripping factual account than a literary experience, so I had adjusted my expectations accordingly (these pieces I find intersect for comfort and convenience with heavier/fictional reads).   

While devouring it as I might a cold pizza on a Sunday morning, I could only ponder in astonishment at what a fuss was made of this tawdry diplomatic bedroom farce, while feeling so sad for Stephen Ward. Of course, certain classified intelligence files would now be accessible that had not yet become so when Honey Trap was penned, outdating various lingering question marks. Yet we hear very little in this wake, as if this book's authors had indeed concluded all there really was to conclude. In that sense, Honey Trap may never become truly outdated.*

Whilst I found Honey Trap's incessant meandering back through certain characters' darkened pasts irksome, along with the sheer volume of these incidental characters, this loss of momentum is often the price for the requisite thoroughness. Even so, the authors (or publishers, or both) seem set on burdening us with the bedroom quirks and petty agendas of a whole establishment rather than three of four main characters. This is my common issue across much reading, non-fiction and fiction alike. If more authors would just stay focused, instead of rambling off track with scarcely related trivia that consumed them in their quest for background padding! We, the reader, are unconcerned with such superfluity. We don't want to be led in pointless circles just to hear about some secondary character's spouse's sibling's boss's partner's irrelevant part-time sexual fetish, just for that extra shot of shock value. 

These gratuitous muckraking delays border on cheapening the effect of the mighty yarn that is Honey Trap. Such, however, is the gossipy nature of this beast. It's perhaps inevitable that the telling of a scandal will be over-embroidered with such, like an ornate cake with too much icing (is there such a thing, some might argue). There's an art to gauging enough titillation then stopping, before tabloid quality looms.

That said, anyone who remembers these times may well tut along with me at Honey Trap's vaguely tacky sentiment, while hypocritically slurping it up anyway. I plead guilty as charged. I'll read it again too.

An essential retrospective read for those who remember these events, a great modern history lesson to those who don't!

*A more recent publication, Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence by Cambridge historian Professor Jonathan Haslam published in 2016 by Oxford University Press, reveals how the Profumo affair was a higher threat to UK security than previously thought. It finds that the Russian, Ivanov, was able to photograph top secret documents left out by Profumo after being shown into Profumo’s study by his wife, actress Valerie Hobson. Those documents concerned US tactical nuclear weapons and vital allied contingency plans for the Cold War defence of Berlin. Yet little else has emerged, especially concerning the MI5 and MI6's possible roles in Stephen Ward's 'suicide'. Nor has it ever been clarified whether Ivanov aimed to use Keeler to entrap or obtain information from Profumo. Haslam's new research shows Ivanov did not need to use Keeler thus, ultimately being able to steal information directly from Profumo. This resulted from Profumo's lack of office organisation and security protocol. Profumo left top secret documents visible on or in his home desk while out of his study, failing to secure the room or instruct family members to guard against entry. Consequently, when Ivanov visited Profumo’s home socially, Mrs. Profumo invited him to wait alone in her husband’s study. Ivanov merely needed to pull out his spy camera and take snaps, including of highly classified specifications for the X-15, a top secret experimental high-altitude US spy plane. But that's another book, decidedly more academic and less concerned with the sordid lust triangle that Honey Trap focuses on.

My review of The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, by Leanda de Lisle

The Sisters Who Would Be Queen

by Leanda de Lisle

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Leanda de Lisle undertook a bold and lofty endeavour penning this. She triumphs gloriously.

Most Tudor readers know about the usurping 'nine days queen' Lady Jane Grey who, after her fleeting, reluctant reign, was beheaded under the rightful Queen ['Bloody'] Mary I. Jane, languishing in the Tower of London, might have lived had the ageing Queen Mary's unsettled marriage negotiations with Philip of Spain not looked diplomatically grimmer the more lenient she was towards poor Jane.

Philip's Catholic envoys wanted Protestant Jane's head off, which left Queen Mary's hands tied. Young Jane has been depicted in varying lights by recent biographers less sympathetic than those before who had handed her down to history as an innocent victim of others' dynastic scheming (primarily, that of her parents). 

Many Tudor aficionados, however, until this book, knew only scant details of Jane's two sisters who suffered so appallingly under Mary I's successor, Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch and irrefutable villainess of this piece.

The childless 'Virgin Queen' Elizabeth's reign became fraught with nervous speculation on her successor. Enter the two 'other' Grey sisters Katherine and Mary, maternal granddaughters of Henry VIII's younger sister Mary, 'the French queen'. (The latter had, on her husband Louis XII of France's death, married Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk and produced four children, one being Francis, mother of these three Grey sisters).

All three Grey sisters were treated abysmally because of their positioning in the meandering line of Tudor succession. They are masterfully drawn as distinctly individualised characters: Jane Grey - headstrong, intelligent, yet martyred - was driven by her faith and principles, while torn by her sense of duty. The beautiful, romantically impetuous Katherine Grey was ruled by her heart, not her head. The plainer, diminutive Mary Grey, the least educated or threatening, just kept her head down aiming only to survive her piteous ride. 

The reader is lulled into empathy. We are left deeply moved, immensely informed and ravenous for more of this superb writer's magic. 

Never wanting to put this book down, I was saddened to reach its last page. And that's what great writing is about. A splendid achievement by a formidable writer and historian.

My review of Elizabeth's Women: Friends, Rivals, and Foes Who Shaped the Virgin Queen, by Tracy Borman

Elizabeth's Women: Friends, Rivals, and Foes Who Shaped the Virgin Queen

by Tracy Borman

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Some armchair critics have overlooked the immense task Tracy Borman undertook and successfully completed in writing and getting this published. In a literary avalanche of popular Tudor history dominated by old masters and current favourites, this comparatively unknown writer braved something extraordinary.

Like others, I turned to this after exhausting dozens of biographies on the key Tudor players and their epoch. We must keep our expectations realistic - as with any such addictive material, there is only a finite euphoric altitude we can maintain before desensitisation to the fix itself sets in. No use hammering away wanting the earth to move page after page so far into any such study (we can perhaps reasonably assume that few absolute beginners would turn to this particular title for introductions to the reign). These things considered, it's also impossible not to draw comparisons.

With voices like Alison Weir (and Antonia Fraser, if not specifically on this subject, then characterising the genre itself) to compete with, one has to wonder how others conjure up the confidence to even begin. What makes popular historians popular is not just their detail and accuracy but their voices (some of the most meticulously researched, accurately presented history published is dry, soulless and unreadable).

Borman holds her own voice-wise, here. It may be interesting to compare her progress after twenty, thirty, forty years  (Fraser, for example, already had her distinctively sumptuous, compassionate style down pat by the time of her 1969 Mary, Queen of Scots and, while perhaps growing technically and conceptually since, has preserved what made her successful: it's not so much what she says but the way that she says it! 

Similarly, Alison Weir had her own defining style to begin with - with perhaps more emphasis on impressive citation and indexing that made her stand out from others.

There are countless others. Carolly Erickson, Alison Plowden, David Starkey, David Loades, Eric Ives, the list is as long as it is diverse, all riding high on stylistic hallmarking rather than just breaking even on factualist or conceptualist calibre alone. 

Tracy Borman is yet to demonstrate any such characteristic consistency across any substantial body of published work. She has made a commendable start though and this book deserves its rightful place on any good Elizabethan historian's shelf. 

Though each of Elizabeth's women discussed have been well covered before in greater detail, they are here effectively assembled in a unique and stimulating formation. Context is key, with each woman's positioning seemingly bearing particular relevance on the defining of Gloriana herself.

Great concept. Well written. Will definitely consider reading more of this author's fine work.

My review of The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory

The Other Boleyn Girl

by Philippa Gregory

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

The 2008 movie, starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, made this title familiar to many who would not otherwise have read the book. That mass publicity was a double-edged sword, with the movie receiving mixed reviews and criticism for historical inaccuracy. Indeed, the novel too suffered some disputed historical accuracy but has far greater subtlety and creative licence.

While Philippa Gregory's novel makes requisite use of fictional elements, the film took it to extremes, discrediting the book it promoted. Though Gregory need perhaps not concern herself now, with the global success of her subsequent novels, the debacle must then have been tough for this talented, hardworking author. Certain historical details of this tale are black and white, others grey: 

Earlier historians claimed Elizabeth I's maternal aunt, Mary Boleyn, was Queen Anne's younger sister, but her children believed she was the elder, as does a growing consensus of today's historians. Regardless, legend strongly suggests Mary was thought the more beautiful of the two Boleyn sisters, going by aesthetic ideals of the day. With no less scandalous a public record than her beheaded sister Anne, poor Mary has undoubtedly been as much a victim of malicious press as Anne has been a victim of political propaganda.

A rumoured mistress of King Francis I of France, some historians believe tales of Mary's promiscuity exaggerated, while others deem them plainly apocryphal. King Francis's harsh reference to her as 'The English Mare', 'my hackney' and 'una grandissima ribalda, infame sopra tutte' ('a great slag, infamous above all), may have been merely sour grapes after a more innocently romantic public liaison: she did, after all, leave Francis and his court, and his hearing of her subsequent high profile amours could have simply bruised his royal pride.

When Mary returned to England in 1519, she was appointed a maid-of-honour to Catherine of Aragon, queen consort of Henry VIII. She then became Henry VIII's mistress from around 1521 to 1526. After later marrying wealthy and influential courtier William Carey, she was left widowed then secretly remarried for love to William Stafford, a lowly soldier considered beneath her aristocratic rank. This latter choice resulted in her banishment from court, and she spent the rest of her life in obscurity, dying in her early forties in 1543, seven years after Anne Boleyn's execution.

Many preferred this earlier Philippa Gregory book over her later one, The White Queen. This subject certainly holds more popular appeal, but to me that does not equal a better book.

Gregory's greater challenge was surely always going to be The White Queen, as readers are less familiar with that (infinitely more complex) history than with this story and its principal characters. Therefore, Gregory's greater achievement of those two is, in my opinion, the one which presented the harder challenge, The White Queen.

I nonetheless equally liked this, which makes for the more gripping read, its character list tighter and more focused than The White Queen's convoluted ensemble (that, I believe, is why some rubbished the latter, because they found it harder to follow due to their own lack of knowledge).

The Other Boleyn Girl is a good read by a classy, accomplished writer. Its sequel novel, The Boleyn Inheritance, tells the story of Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard and Jane (Parker) Boleyn.

I like everything of Philippa Gregory's I have so far read.

My review of The White Queen, by Philippa Gregory

The White Queen

by Philippa Gregory 

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I read this novel having exhausted much of the definitive fictional and non-fictional work on my favourite periods. Not my all-time favourite epoch, the more I read on the Wars of the Roses the more interested I become.

The White Queen is the first in Philippa Gregory's series The Cousins' War about the female figures of those 'wars' fought between 1455 and 1487 (with related fighting before and after).

This novel's title refers to Elizabeth Woodville who, as Sir John Grey's widow, was thought to have used occult powers to seduce King Edward IV, becoming his queen and widow. The legendary mystery of her little sons, the Princes in the Tower, is examined, and whether King Richard III had them killed.

Heavily featured is Anne Neville, Warwick the Kingmaker's daughter who will marry Richard III, briefly becoming Queen of England.

We also follow Margaret Beaufort, whose son Henry Tudor will marry Elizabeth Woodville's daughter, founding his famous royal dynasty. 

Whilst this makes no pretence of targeting the intelligentsia, it never stoops as low as hardline history pedants may presuppose. Gregory is first an historian and secondly a novelist. Accuracy to fine detail and meticulous research is evidently paramount, though without compromising literary calibre. That more than suffices for some reading purposes. Non-fiction histories of our less favourite periods can err on the dry side.

If I want to read a great novelist I will. Likewise with a great academic historian. But for deepening my familiarity with such a convoluted and not especially gripping episode, I prefer an accomplished historian who can fictionalise engagingly - not simply either a dashing literary wordsmith or a formidable date-spouting egghead.

If we had Proust, Dostoyevsky, Hugo or Virginia Wolf writing on this topic they would lack the specialised knowledge required of it. To make such a book work it must be done by an historian rather than a novelist. Imagine Barbara Cartland, the most read romance novelist, attempting this? Then again, would we really sit pigheadedly yawning through some dry, dusty old textbook purely for bare factuality's sake?

This genre therefore sits legitimately on the educational spectrum, veiled in a tissue of that popular sweetener: romantic spin. That was what I sought on this occasion and was what I found. I usually keep my literary fiction in one box and my historical fiction and non-fiction in two others. Expecting both combined can be unrealistic.

This is an impressively substantial, satisfying read by a woman who knows her material and was clearly aiming also for a popular TV spin-off. That eventuating ten-part 2013 BBC adaptation was said to have had, like so many of its genre, a cheapening effect, receiving mixed to negative reviews. Ms. Gregory would have nonetheless laughed all the way to the bank.

Although I tend to read more non-fiction history, skipping straight to the facts, this fictional piece marked a well-earned break from my borderline stuffy convention. Good for Philippa Gregory and may she reap all riches she's worked so hard for.

My review of Henry: Virtuous Prince, by David Starkey

Henry: Virtuous Prince

by David Starkey

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Being one of the more recent Henry VIII biographies, and being specifically about Henry's youth, this was a popular choice when widespread interest became fuelled by 'that' TV series with Jonathan Rhys Meyers. I checked it for comparison with the 5 others I've read on Henry.

I rate it on par with the good ones for dynastic background and incidental (impersonal) detail, but not for character study. If more drily and stuffily presented than personally accessible, this is academically fine and faultless in its fine detail.

Not the first Starkey biography I've read, this is his pet dynasty. He specialised in Tudor history at Cambridge, writing a thesis on Henry VIII's household. His knowledge, as would be expected, is impressive, while his reader-connection is standoffish. This makes for a drier, less authentic result than I seek in any biography.

Focusing on young Henry rather than his life, this might have been a more personal look at the 'spare' heir whose apparent destiny changed course for the better with the death of his older brother Arthur. No matter how meticulously researched and presented, personal supply inventories and monetary accounts do not suffice, in my mind, as 'personalisation'. Rather, a more intimate style of penmanship than Starkey's is the key.

While, admittedly, generalisations can be invalid, the notary female historical biographers I've read (mostly, not all) have achieved more evocative results than their male contemporaries. Such women have been criticised for being overly emotive in approach and Starkey seems to be making a point around this in his own more remote, albeit supremely erudite, style. If, like me, you like blood pumped into a study's cheeks, tones given to their voice, rationale explained around their more private decisions, then Starkey disappoints. 

Only fair to consider that the 'heart and soul' we might be prospecting for in this has been reaped over and over from Starkey's most formidable biographical predecessors - there was no point in his aiming to replicate, but rather to find an original take on this weightily covered topic. In this unenviable task he succeeds, leaving his own hallmark on the vastly sprawling genre of Tudor biography.

This slightly prickly addition to any Tudor reading shelf will contribute balance and sophistication.

My review of Henry VIII: The King and His Court, by Alison Weir

Henry VIII: The King and His Court

by Alison Weir

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I love most of Alison Weir's work and this is no exception.

The research is astonishing. The clothes, décor and meals of England's infamous catalyst-king of the reformation, his court and his six wives are wondrously detailed.

The journey of the golden-haired boy, the meaty young lion and the obese, middle-aged tyrant is sumptuously charted. His gargantuan ego and delicate insecurities are thoroughly fleshed out. The human side of 'God's anointed' is sensitively examined.

The extremes he went to for a legitimate male heir were steered by the notion that his daughters would be unable to sustain his father Henry VII's fragile new dynasty (established not by laws of primogeniture but by triumphing in the Wars of the Roses).

Great Harry's struggles with Rome over his insistence on discarding Queen Catherine to marry Anne Boleyn led to the severance of the Church of England from papal authority and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. As the first ruling Supreme Head of the Church of England, he remained a believer in Catholic teachings even after his excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church.

Though Henry VIII has often been depicted as a lustful, insecure tyrant, this is probably not the full picture. His contemporaries considered him in his prime to be attractive, educated and accomplished. Also an author and composer, he has been described as 'one of the most charismatic rulers to sit on the English throne'.

He became obese in later years. With a 54-inch waist, he required mobilisation by mechanical inventions. He probably suffered from gout and was famously covered with insufferable, stinking, pus-filled boils. His obesity and other illnesses went back to a jousting accident in 1536, in which he suffered a leg wound. All these ailments hastened his death at 55, in 1547, at Whitehall Palace.

He was succeeded by his son, the boy king Edward VI, who died at 16, making way for Henry's older daughter 'Bloody' Mary I. She lived only five years on the throne. Henry's younger daughter, Elizabeth I, was the last Tudor, whose forty-four-year reign brought England stability, helping forge its sense of national identity.

Alison Weir's superb biography explores Henry VIII's legacy and the reasons his magnificent offspring turned out as they did. Had Henry been a different man, history might have unfolded differently and today's English-speaking world would probably not be as we know it.

This masterpiece is to be slowly and thoroughly pondered in brief, leisurely sessions, sleepy weekends or long, late nights. It's as thick as a brick and worth a hundred times its retail value.

My review of Bloody Mary: The Life of Mary Tudor, by Carolly Erickson

Bloody Mary: The Life of Mary Tudor

by Carolly Erickson

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

A terrific biography of a much maligned and grossly misunderstood historical figure, a scapegoat for generations of vicious religious and political propagandists.

Though she burned and persecuted 'heretics', so did most European monarchs of her era, Catholic and Protestant.

After a splendid start in life, Henry VIII's half-Spanish, half-English heir to the English throne was treated cruelly and heartlessly throughout her youth because of her genes, her gender and her parents' reformation-triggering marriage annulment.

Her mother Catherine of Aragon was her only close ally, but King Henry eventually forbade mother and daughter contact. Her younger cousin-husband Prince Phillip of Spain, who she adored, would treat her little better than her father had. 

Her maltreatment, heartache over her parents' unprecedented marriage annulment, her humiliation of being for a time displaced from the succession for her 'bastard' stepsister, Elizabeth, plus Mary's archly devout piousness in a changing religious milieu explains much about this tortured soul.

This granddaughter of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon become a marvellously tragic, at times right royal neurotic.

Despite this and, seemingly possessing the mother of all death stares (she was actually vision impaired), the chronically misrepresented Mary Tudor had the heart and makings of a great anointed queen. History might have treated her more favourably had she had more time to establish herself rather than dying so prematurely - some said of a broken heart - just a few years after ascending the throne.

Her poignant tale is told with compassion and aplomb. Erudite and humane, Carolly Erickson pumps blood into Mary's veins like no other biographer, without apology for the monarch's infamous personal shortcomings.

An enlightening tragedy that peels away the cobwebs of centuries, leaving the reader relieved to live in today's world and historically informed.

My review of The Life of Elizabeth I, by Alison Weir

The Life of Elizabeth I 

by Alison Weir

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Published outside America as Elizabeth the Queen, this is my favourite biography of my favourite historical figure - and I've read almost every one published - by the UK's highest-selling female historian.

Alison Weir's detail and quality closely rival the great Antonia Fraser who, before Weir in an earlier decade, wrote the now definitive work on Elizabeth's great adversary, Mary Queen of Scots, my next favourite historical figure.

With her mother, Anne Boleyn, executed when Elizabeth was two, and her parents' marriage annulled, she was declared illegitimate. At twenty-five this dogged survivor succeeded her half-sister 'Bloody Mary', who had imprisoned Elizabeth for almost a year on suspicion of supporting Protestant rebels.

Tagged the 'Virgin Queen', Elizabeth considered herself married to England, never settling on a groom when any choice of foreign prince could have worked politically against her favour. Her true great love, Robert Dudley 'the Gypsy', was beneath her in rank, of famously treasonous stock and of dubious public renown after the mysterious death of his wife Amy.

More moderate a ruler than her father and half-siblings, one of her mottoes was 'video et taceo' ('I see, and say nothing'). Her Religious Settlement evolved into today's Church of England. Her eponymous age saw English drama flourish, led by Shakespeare and Marlowe, with seamen like Francis Drake knighted as heroes.

Her forty-four-year reign, for many years politically shaky after she was branded a heretic by the pope, eventually brought England stability, helping forge its sense of national identity.

Renowned by detractors as short-tempered and indecisive, Elizabeth was also famously charming and no flibbertigibbet. On the contrary, she was a wily mistress of prevarication. Blessed with the 'common touch' she was hugely popular with her subjects, nicknamed 'Good Queen Bess' and 'Gloriana'.

The Spanish Armada's failure associated her with one of English history's greatest military victories. Her Tilbury speech to the troops, delivered wearing a silver breastplate over a white velvet dress, is legendary.

Whilst Weir's writing has been derided as 'popular history', the jealousy underlying such professional jibing is plainly evident. The Guardian's Kathryn Hughes wrote in 2005: 'To describe her as a popular historian would be to state a literal truth – her chunky explorations of Britain's early modern past sell in the kind of multiples that others can only dream of.'

In her website's Author Biography, Weir graciously shuns the derogatory connotation behind 'popular historian', remarking eloquently:

'History is not the sole preserve of academics. Although I have the utmost respect for those historians who undertake new research and contribute something new to our knowledge. History belongs to us all, and it can be accessed by us all. And if writing it in a way that is accessible and entertaining, as well as conscientiously researched, can be described as popular, then, yes, I am a popular historian, and am proud and happy to be one.'

This book is as thick as a brick, supremely informative and worth infinitely more than its considerable retail value. Kept me up burning the midnight oil for weeks. I reread it two years later, loving it just as much. Well worth the lost sleep. Can't praise it highly enough.

My review of Jean Rhys: Life and Work, by Carole Angier

Jean Rhys: Life and Work

by Carole Angier

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Having read the thin earlier version and this subsequent thick-as-a-brick edition, I strongly recommend the latter if time is on your side.

Life was brutal to Jean Rhys, and she let us know it in her deliciously wry, self-deprecating, sometimes hilarious way. Her incompetence at life was magnificently offset by her profound talent for expressing and rationalising that experience so succinctly in writing. Hence her being described by one literary contemporary as 'one of the finest British writers of this century'.

Some Rhys devotees are prone to the notion that there sits within each of us a 'touch of the Jean Rhys'. Such aficionados may argue that Jean's critics are merely expressing their own insecurities, displaying denial of their own vulnerabilities, by deriding Jean's absurdist take on life.

Indeed, Rhys detractors who have tagged her work a 'gloomfest' seem simply out of their depth to her adherents.

But frivolous pulp fiction was just not her brand; she would rather have starved (and almost did). She wrote not for the light entertainment of the masses. Her artistry remains, in parts, heartbreakingly beautiful. Her 'underdog' themes remain universal. Her poignant narrative is timeless, despite the evocative sense of the times she lived and wrote in (born 24 August 1890 – died 14 May 1979).

With a rare compassion, Carole Angier explores Rhys's fin de siècle white West Indies childhood, her time as an Edwardian London chorus girl, her devastating first love affair with one of England's wealthiest men, her bohemian life in 1920s Rive Gauche Paris, her all-too-fleeting 'money phase' in post WWI Vienna, her three bizarre marriages and the misfortune awaiting her husbands. 

We understand Jean's loathing of the cold, grey early 20th century England she was sent to as a teenager, seen through her Caribbean-creole lens. 

We feel for her in Holloway jail in middle-age, empathise with her being forgotten and thought dead by the literary world after going out of print in WWII. 

We despair at the run-down country shacks she inhabited in her solitary, dirt poor old age prior to the chance rediscovery and wide acclaim leading to her CBE (of which she remarked drily: 'It came too late'). 

Here was an alien who never quite adjusted but could never turn back. Forever displaced. We explore her compulsive drinking and its short- and long-term effects on herself and those around her. 

The biography examines every Rhys work published, chapter and verse, plus much of what she wrote but did not publish. It analyses Jean's distinctive deep and narrow themes, her instinctive sense of form and astonishing use of imagery. It documents how each story and episode mirrors her own history.

It's always great finding a biographer who loves and understands her subject as passionately as you do. But nor does Angier balk at calling a spade a spade when it comes to Jean's glaring character flaws. I felt Angier's lay psychoanalysis went into overreach. I disagreed with certain of her secondhand findings. But I remained hooked and fascinated.

My strongest issue is her coverage of Wide Sargasso Sea. As maddening as Rhys herself in tainting her exquisite body of work with this conceptually anomalous novel (loathed beyond words by some devotees), Angier allocates it an exasperating 42-page analysis chapter. 

As Wide Sargasso Sea remains my one Rhys bugbear, Angier's ramblings on it just reawakened the torment. As with the novel, I climbed walls getting through this dissertation on it. The biographer pithily concedes that: "Some readers may feel, on the contrary, that Wide Sargasso Sea is too full of incident, that it is a Caribbean 'Gothic Novel', too close for comfort to melodrama" [p 556]. That tokenistic nod to us is frustrating. With critics and biographers duty bound to some modicum of objectivity, here we instead get just Angier's gushing subjectivity on the often-contentious topic of Wide Sargasso Sea. 

(Angier at least explains why she admits this novel's Part Two is not 'quite' as successfully executed as it could be, though that's little consolation if you feel the novel has no place in Rhys's body of work.) 

Naturally, those on the opposite side of the Sargasso Sea opinion divide will revel in this chapter I despaired of. But those who disfavour the novel care not that it was Rhys's most commercially successful piece, the one to reawaken her in the public eye after decades of obscurity, making her briefly a bestselling phenomenon on the eve of her death, then a global industry posthumously. We care not for its raft of commercially driven awards. Or for the hoi polloi romance readers' accolades of it being the Rhys 'masterpiece'. This group likely never read or understood her wider, defining body of work. 

Regardless, this chapter's academic relevance is incontestable for students of Rhys literature, who should read other opinions for comparison anyway. My differing with its overall take on Sargasso is merely opinion and taste.

Since first reading Jean Rhys: Life and Work, I have returned to it numerous times after reading other works seemingly inspired by it, most notably Lillian Pizzichini's wonderful The Blue Hour (2009). There is always something I had not fully digested previously. Incomparable in length and coverage, Angier's work remains the definitive Rhys biography, well deserving its 1991 Whitbread Biography Award shortlisting, and winning of the 1991 Writers' Guild Award for Non-Fiction.

Not to be missed. Stock up on gin and luminal. Draw shut the curtains. You won't move until you've read every word.

My review of The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, by Charlotte Mosley (Editor)

The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters

by Charlotte Mosley (Editor)

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

'I also think a volume of letters will have to wait until everyone's dead, don't you, because of hurt feelings?' Diana to Deborah, 17 August 1980.

Such was this potential 834 page can of worms, comprising just an estimated five per cent of the sisters' letters, yet effectively telling six interrelated life stories: the daughters of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale and his wife Sydney Bowles (Sydney's father founded English Vanity Fair and The Lady magazines, employing son-in-law David to manage The Lady).

The Mitford saga lends credence to the adage 'truth is stranger than fiction'. You couldn't invent such tales. Hardly a week went by in the 1930s without one of this sextet making headlines.

The opening letters, from 24 July 1925, show the interwar halcyon years, the English country lives of the Mitford girls. Mainly home-educated by governesses, most are well read thanks to their grandfather Algernon Freeman-Mitford's legacy which included a stately family library.  

Debutante of 1922 and Bright Young Thing Nancy is 20, flitting to and from her London and Oxford social scenes. Pamela is 17, Diana 15, Unity 10 and Jessica 7. Little Deborah is just 2, her first letters not appearing here until she approaches her tenth birthday in 1930.

To subsidise her father's tight allowance, Nancy starts writing, encouraged by literary amigo Evelyn Waugh. Initially uncredited in society gossip columns, she then sells signed articles, until in 1930 The Lady gives her a regular column (presumably helped by family connections). She soon attempts novels, basing characters on relatives, friends and acquaintances.

If Nancy's literary enterprise is a gamble, her love life is a fiasco. She is soon ditched after a futile lengthy engagement to effeminate gay aesthete Hamish St Clair Erskine, four years her junior, second son of the 5th Earl of Rosslyn and ex-lover of her brother Tom. On the rebound, she is engaged to erratic Peter Rodd, second son of Sir Rennell Rodd the soon-to-be ennobled Baron Rennell. The marriage will become largely a sham.

But Nancy's exploits are eclipsed by the younger Diana, who in 1929 wins over her naysaying parents and marries brewing heir Bryan Guinness who will inherit the barony of Moyne. Such a great society beauty is she that family friend James Lees-Milne calls her 'the nearest thing to Botticelli's Venus that I have ever seen'. Evelyn Waugh dedicates his novel Vile Bodies, a satire of the Roaring Twenties, to Diana and Bryan. Her portrait gets painted by Augustus John, Pavel Tchelitchew and Henry Lamb.

Diana triggers scandal in 1932 by leaving her husband for British Union of Fascists (BUF) head Sir Oswald Mosley. As Mosley does not intend leaving his wife 'Cimmie' (Lady Cynthia Curzon, daughter of Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India) Diana lives in a flat as his mistress, until in 1933 Cimmie dies of peritonitis. 

With Unity along for the ride, Diana then ingratiates herself with Adolph Hitler's circle on Mosley's covert bidding for a commercial radio station on German soil to fund Mosley's BUF. In 1936 Diana and Mosley secretly marry in Joseph Goebbels' Berlin house, with Hitler a guest. Unity is meanwhile swept away, a Hitler devotee and Third Reich fanatic, basing herself in Germany much of the time. 

In 1937 teenage Jessica, the 'red sheep' of the family, having long saved to run away, elopes to Spain with second cousin Esmond Romilly, Communist nephew of Winston Churchill. Romilly finds work reporting for the News Chronicle and, after legal obstacles caused by their parents' opposition, they marry and move to London, in the poor industrial East End. 

On 20 December 1937 Jessica has a baby, Julia, who dies the following May in a measles epidemic. In 1939 Jessica and Esmond emigrate to the USA. When WWII starts Esmond enlists in the Royal Canadian Air Force, leaving Jessica in Washington D.C. carrying another daughter, Constancia. After a bombing raid over Germany, Esmond goes missing in action on 30 November 1941. 

Nancy meanwhile discovers in the summer of 1938 she is pregnant but miscarries. In early 1939 she joins her husband Peter Rodd in the South of France as a relief worker, assisting Spanish refugees fleeing Franco's armies in the civil war. Soon afterwards Rodd, commissioned into the Welsh Guards, departs overseas and Nancy, back in London, has her second miscarriage.

The early war years are gruelling for all, except maybe Pamela who always took life in her stride. She has married the brilliant 'rampantly bisexual' scientist and heir to the News of the World Derek Jackson (becoming the second of Jackson's six wives). From around now too, relations between Jessica and Diana permanently freeze, their political rift so deep it becomes personal. 

On 29 June 1940 Diana, prised from eleven-week-old Max Mosley, is interned without charge in Holloway Prison under Defence Regulation 18b, a dangerous person to the state, tagged 'England's most hated woman'. With Mosley already interned separately in Brixton Prison, Diana pines for her husband and four sons (two from each marriage). The couple reunite in Holloway in December 1941, lodged in a flat on prison grounds, thanks to Mitford cousin-in-law Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Both are released in November 1943, on grounds of Mosley's ill health, and placed under house arrest until war's end at Mosley's Crux Easton property in Berkshire.

Nancy's first four published novels, satirical farces, have seen no great acclaim. Her husband fights overseas. She does war work in London's blitz, first as an Air Raid Precautions (ARP) driver. Then at a Paddington casualty depot, writing with indelible pencil on the foreheads of the dead and dying. Then in a canteen for French soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk. Also helping refugees billeted at her parents' London house in Rutland Gate, requisitioned to accommodate Polish Jews evacuated from Whitechapel. An affair with Free French officer André Roy results in a third pregnancy. Nancy again miscarries, with complications leading to a hysterectomy in November 1941. Convalescing, at a loose end she works as an assistant at Heywood Hill's Mayfair bookshop and literati hangout, becoming the shop's social nucleus.

Unable to reconcile with war, Unity publicly shoots herself in the head at Munich's Englischer Garten. She survives with bullet lodged in brain. Hospitalised unconscious in Munich for weeks with Hitler suppressing news coverage, she is 'missing' to her family in England. After two months her parents Lord and Lady Redesdale hear from a clinic in neutral Switzerland, where Hitler has had her sent. Transporting Unity home by ambulance, Lady Redesdale becomes her carer. Permanently impaired with a mental age of twelve, Unity is volatile and incontinent. This compounds the stress on the Redesdales' marriage, caused by political differences. They permanently separate.

Deborah at first helps with Unity, then after marrying in 1941 roams England following in-training Cold Stream Guards husband Andrew Cavendish, second son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. By war's end she has lost two babies, her only brother Tom, four best friends and two brothers-in-law. Her husband has unexpectedly become heir to his father's dukedom.

The post war years I found the most gripping. Unity dies aged 33 from her lingering gunshot wound. Nancy enjoys a literary breakthrough with The Pursuit of Love, gives up on her unhappy marriage and moves to Paris to be near new love of her life, Charles de Gaulle's right-hand man Gaston Palewski. Bedecking herself in haute couture she becomes an ardent Francophile, nicknamed by her sisters the 'French Lady Writer'. 

Diana and Mosley, social pariahs through their politics, move to France near to Nancy, becoming friends and neighbours of fellow pariahs the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (the abdicated King Edward VIII and twice divorced Wallis Simpson, whom he has married).  

The 1950s are for me the centrepiece of this epic, with the sisters at their peaks. Nancy's writing career soars while her adoration of Palewski is never fully reciprocated, their coupling never formalised. His diplomatic career and other romances leave Nancy in the shadows, over years their relationship trickling to naught. Nancy's acerbic wit, irresistibly funny, shields a tortured woman. Unrequited love, loneliness and sisterly jealousy are thought her underlying issues. She also reveals having felt unloved by her mother (a complaint shared by none of her sisters).

Deborah has become Duchess of Devonshire, soon-to-be hostess of royalty and world leaders (she is also related to the Kennedys by marriage). She administers historic Chatsworth House, her husband's 35,000-acre family seat which was institutionalised for WWII. Planning to move in, she oversees its colossal restoration. She is also Châtelaine of Bolton Abbey estate in Yorkshire and the Lismore Castle estate in Ireland. She involves herself in local charities and functions, supervises staff, shares her husband's interest in thoroughbred racehorses and breeds Shetland ponies. 

Jessica, war-widowed and remarried, could not be more different. Renouncing her gentrified roots, she is a naturalised American and Communist Party USA member, living in Oakland, California. In her 10 November 1951 letter to Deborah, who contemplates visiting, Jessica writes: 'We lead an extremely non-duchessy life here. For instance, if you want to stay with us you would have to sleep on a couch in the dining room, we don't have a spare room here ...' Jessica becomes an American civil rights figure and bestselling author as celebrated as Nancy. The older of her two little boys, Nicholas, is killed in 1955 when hit by a bus. She never speaks of it. Mellowing, she resigns from the Communist Party in 1958.

Pamela, teased fondly by her sisters who nickname her 'Woman', shuns world affairs and keeps to country life. This is reflected in Poet Laureate John Betjeman's unpublished poem The Mitford Girls, ending with a line about his favourite: 'Miss Pamela, most rural of them all'. Living variously in England, Ireland and Switzerland, she is the least active correspondent (perhaps mildly dyslexic, notes the editor), yet deliciously dotty. Divorced with huge settlement, she sets up home with an Italian horsewoman, her life companion. Never remarrying, she is thought to have become 'a you-know-what-bian' as Jessica writes to her husband in 1955 when first visiting Europe with her American family.

The sisters' frail old father Lord Redesdale dies in 1958. His estranged wife, their mother, soon follows. As the seasons turn, we witness the inevitable peaks and troughs, stumbling across some heartrending tragedy, fabulous triumph or side-splitting gem. 

Take for instance Nancy's shriek-worthy nickname 'Pygmy-Peep-a-toes' for five-foot two-inch Princess Margaret, who is constantly in the headlines over her affair with Group Captain Peter Townsend and whose open-toed shoes Nancy thinks vulgar.

Or Deborah's nickname 'Cake' for the Queen Mother, given after a wedding where, on hearing the bride and groom are about to cut the cake, QM exclaims 'Oh, the cake!' as if having never seen it happen before. 

Their drollery and regal 'Mitfordese' drawl recurs throughout ('Do admit!' 'Do tell!' 'Please picture!')

As the 1960s and '70s unfold we see the sisters age and face social revolution, while old grievances to one another fester. These include: whether Jessica's memoir Hons and Rebels invents episodes of their growing up years to match Nancy's fictionalised versions in The Pursuit of Love; whether their brother Tom, killed in WWII, was a Communist supporter, Nazi sympathiser or neither; and Nancy's spitefulness. 

Diana, Deborah and Jessica become grandmother's (one of Jessica's two African American grandsons will later become legal scholar and Professor of Law at Yale James Forman Jr.).

In 1972 Nancy, in poor health, is made a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur, and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). She is soon diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, dying on 30 June 1973 at home in France and cremated, her ashes buried in England alongside sister Unity.

We now witness the remaining sisters forwarding each other's letters when ganging up against each other beneath the smiling repartee. Later ones, after Nancy's agonising death, betray simmering resentments towards her and Jessica, the two who forged independent careers rather than leaning on marriage for wealth. 

This backstabbing of the self-made two is by the most privileged two, Diana and Deborah, though Deborah is more Diana's sounding board for the most part. As the only sister to remain consistently on speaking terms with all the others, Deborah is the natural mediator, though this becomes harder as her husband battles alcoholism.

As they further mature, we see their growth, especially of Diana (once 'England's most hated woman'), essentially so kind yet understandably tortured in rare moments. In exile with Mosley, she has time to ponder, more so after his 1980 death. She suffers from deafness. She writes prolifically, memoirs, biographies, book reviews, translations and commentaries on her heyday, ever remorseless of her pre-war connexions. In A Life of Contrasts: An Autobiography she reiterates, 'I didn't love Hitler any more than I did Winston [Churchill]. I can't regret it, it was so interesting.' 

Only years after Nancy's death will Diana learn from released classified files of Nancy's treacherous role in her wartime internment. Nancy had 'informed' British Intelligence agency MI5 that Diana was 'a ruthless and shrewd egotist, a devoted fascist and admirer of Hitler [who] sincerely desires the downfall of England and democracy in general.' She had later made official behind-scenes noises to prevent Diana's release. Though Jessica had also (from America) lobbied against Diana and Mosley's release, she had not later feigned amity, unlike neighbourly Nancy whom Diana had devotedly supported through her protracted terminal illness.    

Towards the close of the 20th century two more sisters leave us. Pamela, hospitalised after a fall, dies in London on 12 April 1994. Jessica dies in the USA of lung cancer, aged 78, on 22 July 1996, her ashes scattered at sea. She is survived by her widower and two of her four children. Her deep rift with Diana is never healed, their only brief contact having been while politely visiting the dying Nancy.    

The voices taper down to Diana and Deborah, the only two left in the new millennium. The last published letter, from Deborah to Diana, is dated 5 January 2002. When Diana dies in Paris in 2003, leaving no sisters for Deborah to exchange letters with, there's a poignancy finishing this enormous book. 

Diana was described in a Daily Telegraph (16 August 2003) editorial, after her death, as an 'unrepentant Nazi and effortlessly charming.' According to her Daily Telegraph obituary, a diamond swastika was among her jewels.

She was survived by four sons: author Desmond Guinness; Jonathan Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne; Alexander and Max Mosley. Her stepson, novelist Nicholas Mosley, wrote a critical memoir of his father for which Diana never forgave him. Two of Diana's grandchildren, Daphne and Tom Guinness, and her great-granddaughter Jasmine Guinness, became models.

Deborah lived eleven more years, producing published works from memoir to gardening to cookbooks, a whole series on Chatsworth House. Made a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (DCVO) for her service to the Royal Collection Trust, she died widowed on 24 September 2014, aged 94. Her funeral was attended by family and friends, six hundred staff, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. She is survived by three of seven children, eight grandchildren (including model Stella Tennant) and eighteen great-grandchildren.

We cannot pity this youngest, longest living and most advantaged sister, who had such a good innings, yet she comes off as the stalwart figure of the piece and enormously likeable. 

Charlotte Mosley's masterful editing and footnoting is a work of art, her generous chapter introductions setting the scene for each period. There's an indispensable index of nicknames, of which the Mitfords had so many, plus a helpful family tree and scholarly rear index.

One must concur with J.K. Rowling's comment on the front cover: 'The story of the Mitford sisters has never been told as well as they tell it themselves.'

This is the ultimate Mitford fan ride.

My review of Gypsy: Memoirs of America's Most Celebrated Stripper, by Gypsy Rose Lee

Gypsy: Memoirs of America's Most Celebrated Stripper

by Gypsy Rose Lee

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

This 1957 memoir follows the early life of Ellen June Hovick aka Rose Louise Hovick, alias Gypsy Rose Lee, who became a legend in her lifetime.

The author was older sister of later Hollywood actress June Havoc. The pair began in Vaudeville as toddlers, managed under the tutelage of their mother. Baby June was the cute headliner with gawky Rose in the lineup, the latter often in boys' clothes or a pantomime cow's rear end. When the maturing June deserted the act, Rose stepped out of the cow's behind and into the spotlight, becoming Gypsy. She became an icon of big-time burlesque, as vaudeville outran its course and the options narrowed – she had to do something, with mouths to feed and a mother who had kept her from any schooling. Showbiz was all Rose had ever known when she made this fatalistic transition.

She was a self-made lady, a raconteur, an entertainer of the highest order. Of the many (purportedly self-generated) myths about this original queen of reinvention, the greatest was that generated by the mists of time – that she was just a stripper. No such thing, she instead tastefully removed and discarded the odd glove, stocking or feather, shifting emphasis onto the 'tease' in striptease.

Also an actress, author, playwright and radio talk host, Gypsy turned her talents in many directions. She was a formidable intellect, admired collector of rare objets d'art and antiques, widely read, conversant on a glorious array of cultural topics and one of the best dressed women in the public eye. A renowned philanthropist, she gave generously to and supported a vast range of worthy causes.

Herein lies the inspiration behind Sondheim's blockbuster stage and screen musical Gypsy, considered by many the greatest American musical ever. Adaptations famously showcased a gorgeous young Natalie Wood in the 1962 movie's title role. As Gypsy's archetypal overbearing stage mother, Mama Rose, starred the wondrous Rosalind Russell, scoring the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress. Russell's role, earlier created onstage by 'brass diva' Ethel Merman, who won the 1959 Tony Award, became one of theatre's most coveted. Stage revivals have seen subsequent 'Mamas' Angela Lansbury, Patti Lapone and Bernadette Peters reap award after award.

This is a gorgeously written, marvellously entertaining read from a woman with a heart of gold and the sheer, glittering class of showbiz royalty. I adored reading her anecdotes in this delicious memoir, never wanting to put it down and making excuses for early nights with her.

Someone threw away the mold when this fabulous lady was made.

My review of The Pursuit of Laughter, by Diana Mitford

The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Diana Mitford Mosley, tagged on this book's cover 'The Most Controversial Mitford Sister', died in Paris in 2003 aged 93. 

The onetime associate of Adolph Hitler, who attended her 1936 wedding to British Union of Fascists leader Sir Oswald Mosley at Joseph Goebbels' Berlin home, was famously 'unrepentant' to the last about political leanings that led her to Holloway Prison without charge or trial, on MI5's advice, for most of WWII.

'They'll go on persecuting me until I say Hitler was ghastly,' she said in a late life interview. 'Well, what's the point in saying that? We all know that he was a monster, that he was very cruel and did terrible things. But that doesn't alter the fact that he was obviously an interesting figure.'

'It was fascinating for me, at 24, to sit and talk with him, to ask him questions and get answers, even if they weren't true ones. No torture on earth would get me to say anything different.'

This brave, frank singularity was her lifelong hallmark, besides her aristocratic standing, two highbrow marriages and legendary beauty, which her novelist friend Evelyn Waugh said 'ran through the room like a peal of bells', with author-friend James Lees-Milne declaring, 'she was the nearest thing to Botticelli's Venus that I have ever seen'.

But with her sisters seemingly vying for notoriety, rationalising their race with 'Diana started it', her role as instigator of this famous contest would always have had strong readership pull, even had Diana herself never written or published a word.     

A selection of diaries, articles, portraits and reviews, introduced by youngest sister, Deborah Mitford, The Pursuit of Laughter (the title a homage to oldest sister Nancy Mitford's 1945 novel The Pursuit of Love) is testament that Diana did write: prolifically, on a mind-boggling range, with extraordinary eloquence and despite her lack of formal education.

The six Mitford girls were home schooled, some as infants by their mother under the Parents National Educational Union (PNEU) scheme, but mostly by governesses. An Edwardian upper-class prejudice lingered, that saw public girls' schools middle-class, even common. (Their brother Tom prepped with them until aged eight, then boarded at Eton, eventually reading law in Berlin).

The basics their parents thought customary for gentlewomen were reading and writing; basic arithmetic for keeping household books; French, deemed essential for their class; enough geography and history to avoid seeming ignorant in polite society; music, needlework and deportment. 

Their advantage over peers, however, was free-range access to their Batsford Park home library, the repository of a remarkable collection made by their grandfather, Algernon Freeman-Mitford 1st Lord Redesdale, whose country estates their second-in-line father inherited when his older brother died at war.

This library, which moved house with them to Asthall Manor, their father set up away from the Asthall house, in a barn with armchairs and grand piano. It became their autodidactic meeting point, where the foundations of their intellectual lives were laid. 

Unimpeded by adults, they relished being left here to their own devices. While Nancy Mitford and Jessica Mitford longed to be sent to public schools, most of them, especially Diana, shuddered at the thought.

Diana was later a day student at Cours Fénelon finishing school in Paris's rue de la Pompe, the year's enrollment including lectures from visiting Sorbonne professors. In Paris she was painted by her mother's old family friend, Belle Époque portraitist Paul César Helleu, who lived near her hotel and took her around. One such painting appeared in L'Illustration, making her the envy of the school. 

Far from home and unsupervised, Paris was her first taste of independence.  

Her Cours Fénelon year was cut short, however, when she was kept home in disgrace one recess, having left open her diary. Her parents found details of an unchaperoned afternoon cinema date with a young man, which she admitted was 'a frightful disobedience and an almost unforgivable crime.' She wrote 'I learned more at the Cours Fénelon in six months than I learned at Asthall in six years.'

Back in rural England, with the crowding Mitford brood and parents, her London escape would be marriage, sooner the better.

So, her higher education was at the school of life, embraced by those 'Bright Young People' of the Roaring Twenties. The literati. Etonion, Oxfordian and Cantabrigan alumni. Writers, artists and great intellectuals who flocked to her and first husband Bryan Guinness, himself a lay poet-novelist, heir to the barony of Moyne and one of England's richest men. 

The radiant newlyweds, having wrangled for parental nods to marry so young (eighteen-year-old Diana a freshly presented Court debutante) with the groom's exceptional wealth, were instant leading Society figures. Evelyn Waugh dedicated Vile Bodies, a satire of the Roaring Twenties, to the couple. Diana's portrait was painted by Augustus John, Pavel Tchelitchew and Henry Lamb.     

They drew various sets: aesthetes, like Harold Acton, Robert Byron, Brian Howard, Henry Green, Roy Harrod; pre-jet jetsetters, such as Emerald Cunard, Duff and Diana Cooper, and Lady Violet Astor's daughter; cerebrals, like John Betjemen, Lytton Strachey and his girlfriend Dora Carrington; and Noël Coward's theatre crowd.  

Only the dimmest soul could fail to soak much of this up, Diana the antithesis of dim. Not writing about it would have been a far worse crime than anything she might later face suspicion over.

Mitford sister buffs have favourites, mine the eldest Nancy, who mythologised her kin as 'the Radletts' in autobiographical novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate after Diana 'started it all' by scandalously dumping her besotted millionaire spouse for the much older, married, alpha male political livewire Mosley (who refused to divorce for Diana but, soon prematurely widowed, became marriageable). 

(Diana's actions were thought a catalyst of competitive sister Unity's public ingratiation of herself to Hitler. Diana even first brought the pair together, on a German trip to visit their brother Tom, Unity tagging along. Both events were thought catalysts of sister Jessica's infamous reactionary elopement with Communist cousin Esmond Romilly, nephew of Winston Churchill.)

Yet most Mitford buffs read outside their favourite sister, drawing comparisons, cross-referencing the sources of this highborn sibling rivalry. Jessica Mitford's 1960 autobiography Hons and Rebels I found confirmative of Nancy's fictional Mitford/Radlett family portraits. Similarly with the priceless 2010 memoir Wait for Me! of Deborah Mitford, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, friend of the Kennedys and restorer of historic Chatsworth House. Then I read Diana.

Whilst I find Nancy's playful sophistication the most entertaining, with Deborah's warm recollections the most easily digested, Diana is surely the most articulate, her intensity sometimes hard going perhaps due to her more studious genres – she never wrote fiction and her 'portraits' of high-profile loved ones have a distinctly more scholarly tone than any other Mitford memoirist. 

To dub her a widely read intellectual firebrand, cultured beyond words, would be gross understatements – she was formidable. In equal measures too, charming, witty, audacious, at times teasingly funny. This intoxicating mix makes her prose irresistible. 

Having moved to France a post-war pariah with husband Mosley, the couple established publishing company Euphorion Books. There Diana translated Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's two-part magnum opus Faust. 

Other Euphorion publications under her aegis included La Princesse de Clèves et autres romans (translated by sister Nancy Mitford, 1950) and Hans-Ulrich Rudel's memoir Stuka Pilot. She also edited several of her husband's books

In 1965 she wrote the regular column 'Letters from Paris' for the Tatler. She edited fascist cultural magazine The European for six years, contributing her own articles, book reviews and diary entries.

She specialised in reviewing autobiographies, biographies and the occasional novel, with commentary of her own experience of the subject, for The Daily Mail, The Times, The Sunday Times and Books & Bookmen.

She was the lead literary reviewer for the London Evening Standard during A.N. Wilson's tenure as literary editor (he called her the 'most beautiful, most intelligent, and most beguiling of the celebrated Mitford sisters.') The Standard resumed publication of her book reviews from 2001 until her death in 2003.

She wrote the foreword and introduction of 1975 biography Nancy Mitford by aesthete and family friend Harold Acton (on whom Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder character Anthony Blanche was based).

In 2007 The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters was published, a compilation including many to and from Diana, edited by her daughter-in-law Charlotte Mosley.

Diana's own books included: A Life of Contrasts: An Autobiography (1977), The Duchess of Windsor and Other Friends (1980) and her memoir Loved Ones: Pen Portraits (1985). From these she built a considerable fan base. 

Strangers with the worst preconceptions, on meeting her liked her despite themselves. Called 'effortlessly charming' by all, from early acquaintances to wartime Home Office interrogators, to late millennium media interviewees, she was loved by each Mitford sister of whichever ideological bent.

Many held blind to her dazzle, unable to reconcile her old association with the Nazi regime, never dropping her old moniker 'the most hated woman in England'. But in a 2001 letter to sister Deborah, she maintained: 'Being hated means absolutely nothing to me, as you know.'

Some people are simply more than their politics, Diana Mitford Mosley a pure gold example. I was spellbound by this collection of her writings.

My review of Quartet, by Jean Rhys

Quartet

by Jean Rhys

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars 

Published in 1928/9 and set in Paris's bohemian café society, this was Jean Rhys's breakthrough novel. It was her first published piece (other than her 1927 The Left Bank short story collection completed under the tutelage of her then lover, Ford Madox Ford). In America Quartet was titled Postures.

This is thought to have been an autobiographically derived revenge piece based on Rhys's stormy affair and bitter break up with Ford Madox Ford. That real life affair occurred in France under Ford's roof, with the knowledge of his common law wife, Australian artist Stella Bowen, twenty years his junior, who turned a blind eye to his affairs.

Rhys and her first of four husbands, Jean Lenglet, a French-Dutch journalist, songwriter (and spy) had wandered through Europe, living mainly in London, Paris and Vienna. Lenglet had been arrested and jailed on murky 'currency exchange' charges, leaving Rhys alone, destitute and stranded. At Lenglet's protective urging from behind his prison bars, Rhys allowed herself to be 'taken in' by Ford and Bowen, whom she knew socially as a couple. An affair developed with Ford, which his wife winked at, seeming to condone. When that affair ended and Ford cast her off, Rhys was alone and deserted in a foreign place. When her husband Lenglet discovered the course of events, he felt betrayed and left her once he was released from jail. 

Rhys was embittered ever thereafter, considering Lenglet the great love of her life, a soul mate with whom she had a daughter, Maryvonne. Rhys and Lenglet remained close friends for life, but always from afar, never reuniting romantically. This episode, one of her great regrets, was paradoxically perhaps her greatest creative catalyst. 

Rhys's inference in Quartet is that the Ford-based character was a monstrous predator exploiting the vulnerable young Rhys-based female protagonist, and that she was not his first such victim. That he serially chews up these young women, ruins their lives then spits them out. And that his wife, passively complicit, remains partly in denial for self-preservation. 

Having read every word Jean Rhys ever had published, I see she's still not quite formed in this work. Yet there she is, a legend in the making. Her incisive take on this heroine's plight gives an alarming first glimpse of the Rhys we'll come to adore in later books.

Her disturbingly close-up look into this, her first protagonist's lot, is something rare and unique, leaving us wanting more and forgiving of Rhys's not-quite-there-yet form. The parallels to the novel's real-life basis are bold:

Stephan, a fly-by-night European art dealer, is charged with selling stolen artwork and sentenced to a year's jail. Mado, his wife, finds herself stranded, alone and destitute. At Stephan's urging, she moves in with wealthy Englishman H.J. Heidler and his painter wife, Lois. H.J. has a history of inviting young women to move into his and Lois's 'spare room' and initiating affairs with these female houseguests under Lois's nose. Lois permits it, wanting to keep H.J. happy. Mado visits Stephan weekly in jail, which H.J. and Lois complain about and discourage her from continuing. As Mado succumbs to H.J.'s intimate advances, it is unclear how willing or reluctant she really is. When Stephan is released from jail, he leaves France without Mado. She is left alone, stranded and destitute and we wonder what will become of her. 

The title Quartet refers to these four main characters. Each of their real-life counterparts wrote and published their own version of this affair, all fictionalised except Stella Bowen's in her 1940 memoir Drawn from Life. In Rhys's, this first published of the four accounts, we see one of the most underestimated twentieth century greats first granted a voice that resonates with incomparable clarity and realism.

The 1981 Merchant Ivory film of this, starring Isabelle Adjani, Maggie Smith and Alan Bates won Isabelle Adjani the Cannes Film Festival's Best Actress award and Maggie Smith the Evening Standard Awards Best Actress award. Like other screen adaptation attempts at Rhys's writing, it failed to impress her fans.

No other writer would ever come close to this one, with her unmatched, unique and marvellous voice. Jean Rhys will forever remain in a league of her own. There was no one like her before and has never been since.

After you've read this first one, be sure to move on to her later works and witness the magnificent development.

My review of Sybil Thorndike: A Star of Life, by Jonathan Croall

Sybil Thorndike: A Star of Life

by Jonathan Croall

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Though a name seldom heard in today's popular culture, Dame Sybil Thorndike lives on in the theatregoing psyche with the likes of Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry, considered by many as one of the 20th century's greatest actresses. 

A quintessentially English figure, she was a humanitarian of global proportion, working tirelessly offstage and on, bolstering endless philanthropic causes and mentoring an entire generation of great classical actors - Lord Laurence Olivier called her his surrogate mother. 

A staunch unionist, she was involved in the early days of British Equity. A visionary and an innovator, she was involved in establishing The Arts Council, The Old Vic, the National Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre and the Thorndike Theatre in Leatherhead. 

The First British actress to appear on a postage stamp, her ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey.

Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan for her, in which she starred to major acclaim in London in 1924, not long after the Roman Catholic Church's canonisation of Joan of Arc. Having first played 19-year-old Joan at almost 32, Sybil reprised the role periodically for various recitals throughout her long and distinguished career. 

Made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1931, then Companion of Honour in 1970, she was awarded an honorary degree from Manchester University in 1922 and an honorary D.Litt from Oxford University in 1966. 

Never a raving beauty, she was known for her loathing of dressing-up (yet also for mingling with royalty). An arch-eccentric, she was a self-proclaimed 'Socialist-Royalist' (a contradiction in terms, some argued), who lived on a pittance for most of her life whilst quietly becoming an arts legend. 

Though perceived from afar as a formidable force, she had no airs or graces close-up and knew everyone's name down to the lowliest understudy or stagehand she worked with. She was in her element performing in the open parks and ancient ruins of Britain, Europe, Africa and the East without so much as a curtain, costume or stage. 

Most notably a great tragedienne, she also loved smaller, 'interesting' roles, light comedy and experimental theatre. Unlike many of her great contemporaries, ego was not her defining feature and it was to Sybil that many a teary, bullied greenhorn thespian turned for succour and encouragement. 

Irrepressibly ebullient, she saw only the best in people, places and situations. A whirlwind of positivity with distinctively precise diction and a voice like a great bell that readily filled any arena unamplified (this acoustic power, despite having damaged her voice on a 1905 US Shakespearean tour, with recurring vocal problems plaguing her for her remaining working life).   

Jonathan Croall's enthralling 584-page biography sits among the finest I have read of anyone. Riddled with priceless anecdotes both hilarious and heartwarming from start to finish, this theatrical time capsule is pure gold. Croall's historical research is meticulous, his literary craftsmanship sublime. His strong theatrical background shines through each rich paragraph. 

Why he has not been more prolific in this field in which he so excels is baffling. His talents have perhaps been well spent elsewhere, as co-founder and editor of Arts Express magazine, editor of the National Theatre's magazine StageWrite and Programmes Editor at the Old Vic. Croall's other works are now absolutely on my to-read list, headed by his extensive work on Sir John Gielgud. 

But Sybil ...

Born in Lincolnshire in 1882, this daughter of Rochester Cathedral's Canon lived and worked into her 90s, gracing the world's stages with some of the finest classical drama seen, often appearing with her husband Sir Lewis Casson. 

She had first trained for classical piano, commuting to London for weekly lessons at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. At 11 she debuted publicly as a pianist, but by 18 piano cramp had forced her to abandon that vocation. Only then, encouraged by her brother, actor-author Russell Thorndike, did she train formally in drama – though the sibling pair had since toddlerhood acted recreationally, hamming it up along with their younger sister. 

At 21, Sybil had her first professional contract, touring the USA with actor-manager Ben Greet's company. In four years she played some 112 roles. By 1908, understudying the title role of Candida in a production directed by that play's author, George Bernard Shaw, she met Lewis Casson, whom she married that December. The couple had four children, several grandchildren and numerous great-grandchildren, many becoming actors, directors or tutors. 

Sybil went to Broadway in 1910, then joined London's Old Vic Company from 1914–18 playing leading Shakespearean and other classical roles. She played Hecuba in Euripides' The Trojan Women (1919–20), then from 1920–22 with her husband starred in a British version of France's Grand Guignol directed by Jose Levy.

Thorndike and Casson were active Labour Party members with strong Leftist views. They preferred living in or around abject poverty to remain true to their craft rather than take on commercial success, which nevertheless constantly beckoned. 

Sybil especially preferred being away from London, touring the British provinces, kipping in their familiar seedy digs, performing to adoring throngs of miners and other unlikely labourers - regularly extending this ritual to far flung places like South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, relishing giving live recitals to natives in fields, pubs, historic sites, libraries, barns and civic halls. 

As a pacifist, Sybil was a member of the Peace Pledge Union and gave readings for its benefit. During WWII, she and her husband toured in Shakespearean productions on behalf of the Council for the Encouragement of the Arts, before joining Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson in the Old Vic season at the New Theatre in 1944.

At the end of WWII, it emerged that Sybil was on "The Black Book" or Sonderfahndungsliste G.B. list of Britons to be arrested in the event of Nazi invasion!

Though she mostly shunned the big screen, favouring live performance, she had made her film debut in Moth and Rust (1921), appearing in numerous silent films the next year, including Bleak House, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice and The Scarlet Letter. Her most notable film roles include Nurse Edith Cavell in Dawn (1928), General Baines in Major Barbara (1941), Mrs. Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby (1948), Queen Victoria in Melba (1952) and the Queen Dowager in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) with Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier, for which she was awarded the National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress. She made her last film appearance – in a version of Uncle Vanya in 1963. 

Her last live performance was at the Thorndike Theatre (built for and named after her) in Leatherhead, Surrey, in There Was an Old Woman in 1969, the year Lewis Casson died. She continued with radio and TV recordings, her final screen appearance in the TV drama The Great Inimitable Mr. Dickens, with Anthony Hopkins in 1970.

I became so intensely hooked with this book, for several ecstatic weeks, I was reluctant to finish it. I shall certainly reread it, probably more than once. A reading treat to top all others, this is one of my all-time favourite biographies. 

Can't recommend it highly enough.