My review of The Light of Day: The First Man to Come Out at the Dawn of Gay Liberation, by Christopher Stephens & Louise Radnofsky

The Light of Day: The First Man to Come Out at the Dawn of Gay Liberation

by Christopher Stephens & Louise Radnofsky

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

There are moments in history when private lives, long lived in the shadows, suddenly become legible. Not because the world has changed, but because someone has taken the risk of speaking plainly.

In The Light of Day, Christopher Stephens* and Louise Radnofsky** trace one such moment — and the long, complicated life that surrounded it — through the story of Roger Butler, a blind gay activist whose papers, recordings and memories form one of the most intimate archives of queer life in postwar Britain.

The book begins not with a political rally or a courtroom, but with a small, unassuming house in east Oxford. It is the early 2000s. Christopher Stephens, then a young student, has been asked by a friend to visit a man in his sixties and read to him.

The request is simple enough, but the man — Roger Butler — wants to know one thing before he agrees: Is he one of us? The question lands with the weight of decades. For Butler, 'one of us' is not merely a matter of identity; it is a matter of safety, trust, and the possibility of being understood without translation.

Christopher passes the test. And so begins a friendship that will shape the rest of his life — and, eventually, this book.

Stephens’s early visits are tentative. Butler is wary, proud, and accustomed to disappointment. But slowly, over bottles of red wine and readings of Alan Hollinghurst and Edmund White, the two men settle into a rhythm: Stephens reads aloud, Butler listens, interrupts, laughs, corrects, remembers.

Sometimes he asks Stephens to read his own autobiographical essays — fragments of a life lived in secrecy, danger and occasional exhilaration.

These scenes form the emotional core of The Light of Day. They are quiet, domestic, almost mundane. Yet they carry a charge that is unmistakably political. In a world where gay men had long been forced to hide, the simple act of reading aloud becomes a kind of reclamation. It is companionship as resistance, intimacy as testimony.

Stephens writes of discovering, for the first time, what it felt like to belong to a 'tribe.' The word is striking. It suggests not only solidarity but relief — the relief of finding people who understand the contours of your life without needing them explained.

For Butler, whose youth was spent in a Britain where homosexuality was illegal, that relief had been rare. For Stephens, it arrives in the form of an older man who has lived through the worst of it and survived.

To understand Butler’s life, one must understand the world he grew up in. Homosexuality remained illegal in Britain until 1967, and the law’s hostility shaped every aspect of gay existence.

Men lived with the constant threat of police raids, public shaming, loss of employment, and imprisonment. The Wolfenden Report of 1957 recommended decriminalisation, but the government refused to act. The Homosexual Law Reform Society was founded in response, staffed largely by volunteers who risked their reputations simply by being associated with it.

It was in this climate that Butler, on 3 June 1960, joined two colleagues in writing a letter to British national newspapers including politically conservative The Spectator. It began, with startling simplicity:

'Sir, we are homosexuals…'

The sentence is almost disarmingly plain. Yet its plainness is precisely what made it radical. The three men signed their real names. They did so knowing that the police could investigate them, that employers could dismiss them, that families could disown them.

It was an act of moral clarity so rare that it reads now like a flare shot up from the darkness.

Stephens and Radnofsky treat this moment not as a historical footnote but as a hinge — a point at which private suffering tipped into public courage. They show how acts of self‑declaration, so dangerous then, would become central to later movements for equality.

Butler’s letter is presented as both a personal risk and a political tactic, a gesture that looked forward to battles still decades away.

Butler’s blindness, which struck in his thirties, adds another layer of complexity to the story. It narrowed his world but sharpened his voice. He became, in effect, a writer without a readership — a man who filled notebooks, tapes and diaries with reflections on his parents, his loneliness, his friendships, his activism, and the strange, stubborn hope that carried him through the years.

When Butler died in 2011, he left all his papers to Stephens. The archive was vast, chaotic, and deeply personal. It contained not only autobiographical essays but home recordings — crackly, imperfect, sometimes moving, sometimes mundane. In one of the final recordings, Butler says he does not regret going blind because it led him to Oxford, and to Stephens.

It is a line that lands softly but stays with you.

The authors approach this archive with care, not attempting to impose a single narrative on Butler’s life but instead letting the fragments speak. The telling swings between eras — the fearful 1950s and '60s, the more permissive but still complicated early 2000s — with a looseness that feels organic rather than disorganised; a structure that mirrors how memory works: associative, wandering, occasionally contradictory.

One of the book’s most striking qualities is its insistence that political change is not only the work of committees and campaigns but of friendships. Stephens’s weekly visits to Butler’s home are not framed as heroic. They are ordinary acts of care.

Yet in the context of Butler’s life, they become extraordinary. They offer companionship in a world that had often denied it. They offer recognition in a world that had often refused it.

This suggests that visibility — the act of being seen — is one of the most radical experiences a person can have. Butler’s life was shaped by the danger of visibility. Stephens’s life was shaped by the relief of it. Their friendship becomes a bridge between these two realities.

Radnofsky’s contribution ensures that the story never loses sight of the broader context. She supplies the historical scaffolding — the Wolfenden Report, the founding of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, the slow path to decriminalisation — with clarity and restraint. The political never overwhelms the personal; it frames it.

Although The Light of Day is rooted in the past, it speaks directly to the present. In an era when LGBTQ+ rights are again contested in parts of the world, Butler’s story feels less like distant history and more like a reminder of how fragile progress can be.

The account shows that liberation was not inevitable. It was built by people who risked their jobs, their reputations and their freedom simply by telling the truth.

Stephens and Radnofsky do not indulge in triumphalism. They acknowledge the reactionary undercurrents that persisted long after 1967, and the loneliness that shaped Butler’s life even in more permissive decades.

Never quite bleak it is, in its way, a celebration: of friendship, of intellectual companionship, of the small acts of loyalty that sustain a person through difficult years.

In the end, The Light of Day is about seeing and being seen. It is about the courage required to make oneself visible in a hostile world, and the quieter courage of showing up for someone who has lived too long in the dark.

It is a tribute to a man who wrote in the margins, who risked everything by signing his name, and who found, late in life, a companion willing to read him back into the world.

Stephens and Radnofsky have written a book that glows with understated grace. It does not try to dazzle. It pays attention — to a life, to a friendship, to the long, slow arc of change. And in that attention, it finds its light.

The back cover comment by Sir Ian McKellen reads: 'Your book is the "really good book. Just one" that Roger Butler would have wanted.'

I agree.

A beautiful, heartwarming read about friendship. Highly recommended.

*Christopher Stephens is a London based academic and CEO of an educational charity that promotes research into issues of importance to contemporary society. He has published on topics ranging from ancient Church History to language and practices relating to diversity and inclusion. Christopher was next of kin to Roger Butler, inheriting Roger’s extensive archive of writings and letter correspondences on his death.

**Louise Radnofsky is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Washington, D.C., where she has covered healthcare, the White House, immigration and currently, sports. She holds two degrees in modern history from Oxford, where she attended University College, and one from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She and Christopher have been friends for more than 20 years.

My review of A Recipe for Murder, by Duncan Mcnab

A Recipe for Murder

by Duncan Mcnab

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

The 2023 Erin Patterson mushroom murder case gripped not just Australia but the world, spawning months of newsreel, podcasts and online debate, attracting near comparable public attention to the 1982 Lindy Chamberlain case. 

So, it seems right and natural that this author, an old hand at true crime, should attend the court hearings and research the town of Leongatha, Patterson's family and history, with his usual expertise.

It has often been said there's a peculiar intimacy to crimes that happen in kitchens: the choreography of hands, the small rituals of preparation, the way ordinary gestures can be turned into instruments. 

Duncan McNab’s A Recipe for Murder takes that intimacy and tilts it until the familiar becomes uncanny, tracing a case where domestic routine and lethal intent meet with devastating clarity. 

The book reads like a slow, precise unpeeling of a life — layer by layer — until the raw, exposed truth is left trembling on the page.

McNab writes with the authority of someone who has spent years watching how investigations unfold. He reconstructs scenes with a reporter’s fidelity to fact and a novelist’s ear for the telling detail: the texture of a sauce, the smell of mushrooms, the small, almost accidental choices that accumulate into motive and method. 

These sensory particulars do more than decorate the narrative; they become the book’s moral compass, guiding the reader through the ordinary textures of family life toward the extraordinary consequences that follow when trust is weaponised.

The hush of the kitchen — the clink of a spoon, the slow slide of a lid, steam fogging a window — is a recurring motif, and McNab uses it to remarkable effect. He lingers on domestic minutiae not as filler but as evidence: grocery lists, recipes, polite exchanges at the dinner table are all clues in a human drama. 

In his hands the kitchen becomes a stage where motive and method are both cooked and consumed, and the reader learns to read the ordinary as if it were a ledger of intent.

What distinguishes McNab’s account is its restraint. He resists the sensational turn that so often marks true-crime retellings, preferring instead a cool patience. The legal machinery — the police work, the forensic tests, the courtroom choreography — is laid out with clarity and respect for complexity, never reduced to melodrama. 

This measured approach allows the human elements to breathe: grief, denial, the small hypocrisies and loyalties that complicate any neat assignment of guilt. The result is a narrative that feels both rigorous and humane.

Characterisation is subtle rather than theatrical. McNab sketches the people involved with an economy that trusts the reader to fill in the spaces: the accused are not monsters on a stage but people whose ordinary habits and private resentments become legible under scrutiny. 

Victims, jurors, lawyers and investigators are rendered as fallible, complicated beings rather than mere archetypes. 

This humane restraint deepens the moral ambiguity at the heart of the story: culpability is not a single, bright line but a series of shadows and reflections.

The book balances procedural chronology with intimate domestic vignettes, and that alternation keeps the narrative taut. McNab’s prose is spare and precise; he lets scenes accumulate rather than insisting on rhetorical flourish. 

The legal passages are lucid without being dry, and the procedural detail never overwhelms the human story. There is a clear respect for the reader’s intelligence throughout: the book explains what must be explained and leaves the rest to the reader’s imagination.

McNab’s attention to texture is one of the book’s most haunting qualities. He lingers over the sensory — the smell of mushrooms, the way a sauce thickens, the tactile certainty of a knife in the hand — and these details become instruments of suspense. They do not merely set scene; they map motive. 

The ordinary becomes ominous because McNab shows how easily domestic acts can be repurposed into instruments of harm. That transformation is the book’s central, chilling insight.

The narrative’s coolness is a deliberate choice that often serves the subject. A crime executed with clinical deliberation is best examined with a steady hand, and McNab has it. 

Yet there are moments when this very steadiness can feel like distance. The refusal to indulge melodrama is admirable, but occasionally a sharper emotional edge might have made the stakes feel more immediate. Even so, the restraint is more often an asset, mirroring the methodical nature of the investigation and the quiet, bureaucratic rhythms of the courtroom.

McNab’s reporting is patient and measured. He reconstructs the meals, the markets, the small decisions that accumulate into catastrophe, and he does so without the breathless cadence of tabloid retelling. 

Instead, the book offers a steady accumulation of small facts and human moments that, together, form a convincing portrait of how a murder could be both planned and hidden in plain sight. 

The reader is invited to watch the slow unravelling, to notice the tiny misalignments that, when added together, become decisive.

There is also a moral seriousness to this work. He refuses easy answers and resists the temptation to turn people into symbols. The book asks the reader to sit with ambiguity: to feel sympathy and suspicion in the same breath, to understand that culpability can be braided through everyday life. 

This ethical complexity is one of the book’s strengths; it makes the narrative feel less like a verdict and more like an inquiry into the human condition.

The courtroom scenes are handled with the same measured craft as the domestic ones. The author does not dramatise legal procedure for effect; he renders it as a sequence of human decisions, technical tests and rhetorical manoeuvres. 

The law appears not as an abstract moral arbiter but as a human institution, fallible and procedural, where truth is teased out through cross-examination, expert testimony and the slow accretion of evidence. That depiction lends the book a sober realism: justice is not a sudden revelation but a painstaking construction.

For readers who come to true crime seeking gore or spectacle, A Recipe for Murder will be a different sort of satisfaction: a slow, exacting unravelling that rewards attention. 

For those who appreciate prose that attends to the small, telling details of life, McNab’s work will feel like a well-made dish — composed, balanced, and quietly devastating. 

The book does not promise catharsis; it offers instead a careful, literate excavation of a case that is as much about ordinary human routines as it is about the extraordinary consequences that can follow when those routines are weaponised.

In the end, the book’s quiet power lies in its refusal to sensationalise. It treats its subjects with a kind of austere compassion and trusts the reader to sit with the discomfort that follows. 

A Recipe for Murder is a work of attentive reporting and disciplined storytelling: a book that reads like a well-composed dish, balanced in flavour and devastating in its aftertaste. 

It is a study in contrasts — warmth against chill, patience against sudden loss — and it leaves the reader with the uneasy knowledge that the most intimate spaces of our lives can also be the most dangerous.

If this author’s aim is to make us look again at the ordinary and see how easily it can be turned lethal, he succeeds. This is not a book that will be devoured in a single breathless sitting; it is one to be read slowly, with attention to the small, telling details. 

In that slow reading there is a kind of moral education: a reminder that the domestic is never merely domestic, and that the rituals of everyday life can, in the wrong hands, become instruments of ruin.

I've enjoyed several of Duncan McNab's true crime books, most notably The Usual Suspect: The Life of Abe Saffron (2005); Killing Mr Rent-a-Kill (2012); Roger Rogerson: From Hero Cop to Convicted Murderer – The Inside Story (2016) and Getting Away with Murder (2017). This latest kept me up late into the night for weeks.

Highly recommended.

My review of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, by Andrew Lownie

Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York

by Andrew Lownie

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Despite this book's title and style, British historian and author Andrew Lownie is not your workaday tabloid hack. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Westminster School and Cambridge alumnus with a University of Edinburgh master's degree and doctorate, the quality of this respected literary figure's work is often beyond reproach.

Yet this book screams to be likened to the sensationalistic works of Andrew Morton, whose journalistic roots lay indeed in tabloid fodder before he grabbed the spotlight as a royal and celebrity biographer, initially covering the Yorks and then Fergie's onetime bestie Diana, the late Princess of Wales.

Lownie does have prior royal-bashing form – most notably in Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (2021) – yet has been less unforgiving to other eminent subjects, as in his 2019 biography of Lord and Lady Mountbatten, The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves.

This chronicle of the embattled former Duke and Duchess of York, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson, is certainly an eye-opener, in parts bordering on rabid republicanist rant territory, causing the reader to suspect that the author 'doth protest too much, methinks'. I might have been tempted to say this reeks of tall poppy syndrome, but I know the author's body of work better than that.

Once the reader adjusts to the glaring hatchet job tone and nature of this intriguing tome, we find a seemingly well researched '400-page character assassination' (as Kate Mansey of The Times called it). It must have involved months and months of hard work yet is manifestly unbalanced in its execution – perhaps the only way of biographing such a manifestly unbalanced couple.

Arch-conservative commentator Jacob Rees-Mogg (who dismissed the work as 'salacious gossip') publicly questioned the reliability of Lownie's sources, to which the author claimed to have interviewed over 300 people, including on-the-record diplomats, naval personnel and special royal representatives.

Lownie's highbrow critics do have a point in the book being a one-sided account of all things bad about these two personae non gratae. Such is the book's venomous nature, one almost feels sorry for them, though the author ensures we ultimately do no such thing.

'All people must surely have their redeeming qualities' lurked at the forefront of my thoughts throughout this repelling read about a repellent pair. Perhaps Andrew Lownie has a personal history with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (?).

Personal history or not, there is that unmistakable stench throughout this piece of a sideshow vendor cashing in on an angry proletariat's insatiable appetite for rotten fish to lob at those dastardly birthright bigwigs, a selling of slop to an angry mob around a guillotine . . .

Cue Enjolras:
'Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again!'

Those daughters of York, the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, have been widely considered the inevitable collateral in this right royal stink, though we are none too subtly reminded, here, that these blameless young women were themselves born 'entitled' (how is that their fault, one ponders? We don’t choose what we're born into. Both princesses have real-world jobs and contribute to charitable causes).

The Yorks' cosy association with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is, naturally, a focal point, being media flavour of the month, year or decade, while we are reminded, ad nauseam, of dim-witted Randy Andy's petulance, tantrums, arrogance, vanity and sex-obsessed shortcomings, his cruel bullying of staff, and absurd and impossible demands.

This is no great revelation; it is no veiled secret that the former queen's favourite was always lacking in the noblesse oblige department. Fleet Street has dined out on it for decades.

Lownie at least acknowledges Andrew's Falklands War heroism, paraphrasing selected former military comrades who concede in interviews that, beneath the pompous surface, Andrew was lonely and insecure.

Sarah, we read, became driven by insecurities in a desperate cling to the royal status she married into. As her infamy around overspending is already a matter of public record, we must ask ourselves why this tired old part of her tale was so necessary to repeat, and repeat, and repeat. I suppose if all she can do is spend, spend, and spend, then what else is there to write of her?

La Fergie's innumerable and oft-hilarious fashion faux pas could have made for funnier stuff, lightened the tone a tad. She is even well known for having a wacko sense of humour - hell, even Cruella de Vil had her funny side. But this depiction is dead set on the sinister and grotesque.

I much preferred this author's more elegant 1995 biography John Buchan: the Presbyterian Cavalier and his prize-winning 2015 biography of a Soviet spy, Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess – perhaps they were more sympathetic subjects to chronicle than the revolting Yorks. 

Yet with this infamous couple being so despised by the masses, Lownie seems to have uncharacteristically gone with the flow of public opinion rather than being his usual, more objective self.

I nevertheless remain an avid fan of this distinguished author and look forward to reading his upcoming biography of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, which Lownie has stated on record will 'not be a hatchet job'.

Despite my issues expressed above, I give this its four-star rating not for its gratuitously caustic sentiment, but for the sheer toil that has clearly gone into it, and the undeniably high-quality research and wordsmithing.

My review of A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan, by Laura Thompson

A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan

by Laura Thompson

May rating: 5 out of 5 stars

The collective public memory of Lord Lucan's 1974 disappearance still lingers for many. As the prime suspect in the murder of his estranged wife's nanny, Mrs. Sandra Rivett, at 46 Lower Belgrave Street, Belgravia, London, he was widely believed to have fled Britian, with alleged sightings in almost every global nook and cranny.

For years tabloids theorised about changes of identity, including by plastic surgery. Bizarre, reported whereabouts ranged from to Colombia, to Gabo in Central Africa, to 'Treetops' in Kenya (where Elizabeth II, then a princess, was staying in 1952 when she acceded to the throne). Bogus claims flooded in, including by a bounty hunter hoaxer who had previously kidnapped train Robber Ronnie Biggs.

Cases of mistaken identity filled headlines for decades, including that of a pensioner in Brisbane, Australia, a homeless British expat in New Zealand, an American businessman in Colombia, a Merseyside folk singer slumming it in singer Goa, India, and British politician John Stonehouse, who had tried to fake his own death in Miami but was found and arrested in Melbourne, Australia.

And yet Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, was never found, and the inquest into Sandra's death remains open.

Prior to gambling away everything, neglecting his marriage and getting himself into this almighty mess, Lucan was described by some as a real-life embodiment of James Bond, the whole bag of tricks: Eton educated, debonair, suavely attired in Savile Row suits, charismatic, sculpted good looks, family wealth, artistocratic breeding and great future potential. Having served in the Cold Stream Guards, he breezed effortlessly into a merchant banker's job. He bobsleighed, power-boated and owned racehorses. Dashing between gentleman's clubs with his slicked back black hair, charm, style and good humour, he even owned a soft-top Aston Martin.

Whether fact or apocrypha, legend has it that director Albert 'Cubby' Broccoli saw Lucan as such an ideal casting choice he invited him to screen test for the role of 007, where he sat alongside Sean Connery in the waiting room. Alas, he was no actor and the more ruggedly chiseled Connery won out, but the whole thing would have been a game for Lucan regardless.

Then he screwed up everything, vanished and became an enigma.

In fact, early drafts of the 2006 motion picture Casino Royale alluded to him with James Bond (Daniel Craig) backpacking in Madagascar and playing chess with a drunkard hinted to be the chronically fugitive Lord Lucan lying low in Africa. Lucan has been fodder across all media for half a century.

But no written non-fiction piece has come close to being as meticulously fleshed out as this one, IMHO.

Laura Thompson's forensic deep dive into the case takes us through the timing of events, the settings, histories and genealogies of characters involved (including the exclusive Clermont Club's infamous 'Lucan set' of gamblers), each of their character peculiarities and the protracted investigation and its players – from Lucan's elite 'circle' to the streetwise police and detectives.

At a whopping 448 printed pages, no stone is left unturned.

All possible motives are picked through with a fine-tooth comb. Common conspiracy theories are untangled, facts are laid bare and the reader is left to decide for themselves what was what on that fatal November night, when blood-soaked Lady Lucan ran into the Plumbers Arms at the end of her street and cried: 'Help me, help me, I've just escaped from being murdered! My children, my children, he's murdered my nanny!'

The Lucans having endured a traumatic custody battle over their children, had been on barely speaking terms, as Lord Lucan simmered and stewed over his wife ending up with their house and offspring while he kipped in a flat nearby. The increasingly obsessed Lucan had begun spying on his wife and recording their telephone conversations. Devastating legal expenses, combined with his habitual gambling losses, had made one mighty hole in his finances, and he had a huge axe to grind against his wife Veronica.

She, according to general consensus, was the murder target but, hidden in darkness, her not dissimilar looking nanny, Sandra Rivett, heading downstairs to make tea in the basement kitchen on what would have been her usual night off, was bludgeoned to death and her corpse shoved into a mailsack.

When tea failed to arrive and Veronica went looking for Sandra, she was attacked by Lord Lucan, with whom she engaged in a brief fight before succumbing to his orders to head upstairs and form a plan of action. While he was looking away, Veronica fled the scene and the rest is history.

Lucan, expected at the Clermont at 11:00 pm, failed to arrive and did not answer his telephone. He called his mother the dowager countess late that night, speaking of a 'terrible catastrophe' and asking her to collect the children from his wife's house. He told his mother he had been passing the house when he saw Veronica fighting with a man in the basement. He had entered the property and found his wife screaming.

In a moonlit drive in a borrowed Ford Corsair borrowed from his friend Michael stoop, Lucan rushed 68 km to his friends the Maxwell-Scotts' home in Uckfield, East Sussex, his last official sighting. The abandoned Corsair was found two days later in the port town of Newhaven, about 26 km from Uckfield, in its boot a piece of lead pipe covered in surgical tape and a bottle of vodka.

Some close acquaintances believed that Lucan, guilty of Rivett's murder, committed suicide by scuttling his motorboat and jumping into the English Channel with a weight tied to his body, with some opining a passing ferry must have chopped him up. Others thought he may have been aided out of the country by dodgy financiers before being deemed too great a risk, killed, and buried in Switzerland.

After his sensational 1974 disappearance at age almost forty, Lucan was formally declared dead 27 October 1999, albeit without definitive evidence for the official conclusion.

Several tellings of this fascination episode of history have reached us, including the 1994 alternative history TV film The Trial of Lord Lucan, the 1998 film Bloodlines: Legacy of a Lord, the two-part 2013 miniseries Lucan, as well as a notable ten-part BBC 4 Radio podcast The Lucan Obsession, and Hazell Ward's 2025 mystery novel The Game is Murder.

This book, by one of my favourite biographers Laura Thompson, teases out every possible hypothetical scenario of this notoriously unsolved true crime: whether Lucan hired a hitman to kill his wife but who botched the job by getting the nanny instead; whether there were two attackers; whether Lucan was an innocent (or stalking) passer-by caught up in things trying to rescue his wife, then fleeing to escape predictable blame; whether Sandra Rivett herself was the target, somehow via her own estranged husband; even hinting at whether Lady Lucan herself could had killed Rivett to frame her husband, citing her fragile mental state and evidence of her blood, as well as Rivett's at the murder scene.

The introduction, 'A Brief History of Murder, According to Social Class' offers an insightful framing of what's to come, examining society's stereotyping of villainy versus respectability, and the differing judicial treatment Britain's privileged classes have been served compared with the common rogue. I skipped this and read it at the end.

Like other Laura Thompson books, this one has that flexibility, of the order being seemingly interchangeable. This liberating way of reading I have always favoured.

Smoothly divided into three parts, the main body of the book explores 'The Lucan Myth', 'The Story' and 'The Investigation'. As with many such works and being already familiar with the basic history by having been a young adult at the time of the main events and following it in the news, I perversely read this account in my own order, starting in this case at 'Part III: The Investigation'. I then stepped back to 'Part II: The Story' and finally 'Part I: The Lucan Myth'.

We find the same scenarios repeated throughout, but from the different perspectives of the various people involved before, during and after the central event. The often widely differing quotes and comments of the players in this drama are at times priceless, peppered with parvenu snobbery, highborn noblesse oblige and blue-collar publican, nanny and cop-shop patter.

As always, Thompson's wry observations of the human condition and the ladder games of society are astute and often hilarious.

The end appendices are extraordinarily detailed and informative and include a studiously set out Lucan family tree, an indispensable reference point to flick back to throughout as we read about these people.

A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan follows some of my other favourite Laura Thompson biographies of intriguing historical figures, including Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford the Biography (2003); Agatha Christie: An English Mystery (2007); Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford sisters (2016) and Rex v Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders (2018).

I will read this again. Maybe in order next time, maybe not, but either way I'll re-consume. Enthralling subject matter, deftly crafted by one of the best at the top of her game. A thoroughly enjoyable escape into a world long gone and a mystery never solved.

My review of Cher: The Memoir, Part 1, by Cher

Cher: The Memoir, Part 1

by Cher

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Cher's much anticipated 432-page memoir has been analysed, criticised and praised by commentators quite at odds with one another, since its 2024 release. Diehard fans want one thing, bookworm historians want another, while detractors will always be just that, whatever she says or does.

Despite the famously dyslexic Cher reportedly hiring three ghostwriters to assist her over seven years of rewrites, some legacy media critics have pooh-poohed it, with The Independent's Adam White calling the end result 'flat' while asserting that it does not 'sound like her' and asking 'where's the sass?'

His take sounds to me to be less general than from a fan or cultist adherent's perspective. I see how her more hardcore 'in crowd' may have preferred more of their own lingo and niche wit. Yet one cannot expect the book to be so blinkered in its delivery – this had to speak to a far wider readership, on many of whom certain banter would have been lost.

Cher-isms are by no means absent, they just not as bountiful as certain of her devotees might have preferred. There is certainly no shortage of jovial expletives which, to me, did indeed sound very Cher, her self-deprecating humour out on full display, her earthy candour in full force.

The audiobook is mostly read by actor Stephanie J. Block, who has played Cher on Broadway – a choice perhaps necessitous because of Cher's dyslexia.

Lay reader reviews are mixed, with a common complaint of over coverage of her ancestry, childhood, parentage, passion for fashion and namedropping being collectively drawn out to the point of tedium.

I see their points, yet remained glued regardless. The flip side is that this sure gives bang for buck and never shies away from eyepopping anecdotes, so maybe it depends how much reading time one is willing to commit to this fascinating star.

One consideration with any memoir is that the exercise is necessarily a self-absorbing business, and often the author becomes so caught up in the cathartic task of fine detail recall that segments of the finished work are of more interest to themselves than their readers. In Cher's case her dyslexia may, to some extent, have ruled out this common autobiographical syndrome, leaving us to conclude that the multi-handed ghost-writing and final editing is responsible here.

The Memoir Part 1 covers her (admittedly protracted) journey through a bizarrely rocky childhood echoed in her 1971 hit single 'Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves', even at one point being held in an orphanage in Scranton, Pennsylvania, run by nuns who didn't want to release her back to her mother.

She states: 'Often when I think of my family history it sounds like the opening of a Dickens novel,' but notes that 'resilience is in my DNA.'

Her mother Georgia Holt married and divorced seven times, twice to Cher's father, Johnnie Sarkisian who would become a heroin addict with a 'penchant for larceny and a shaky relationship to employment'. 

Cher tells us: 'The women in my family rarely chose their men well.' Georgia even leaves one of her husbands for his brother. Exclaims the author: 'I mean, jeez. My family. You couldn't make it up.'

Hauled around the country by the peripatetic but hardworking and beautiful Georgia, Cher changes school every five minutes, in shoes held together with elastic bands.

There are ups between the growing up downs. When Georgia is based around Hollywood doing movie extra work, Cher lives around movie stars and plays in their front gardens with neighbourhood kids including Liza Minnelli, getting a peep through the front door at Judy Garland stood on the stairs holding a glass of something.

When she is 15, 25-year-old Warren Beatty almost collides with her borrowed car and, unaware of her age, takes her home and entertains her to make good for his reckless driving, leading to her getting home late and receiving a verbal dressing down by her mother. When he later calls her at home, asking her out on dates, her mother, as besotted with Beatty as were most women, nearly faints hearing his voice, her tone switching from castigation to approval.

Living in LA with family, 16-year-old Cher takes acting classes. In a crowded coffee shop break, she randomly meets fledgling 27-year-old songwriter and junior record producer Sonny Bono, with whom she later moves in with when out of housing options herself. Their relationship is initially platonic, with Cher acting as his cook and housekeeper. She writes that Bono thought she was 18, and that they remained just roommates until she was legal.

Sonny urges her to quit acting class and pursue full-time music.

The memoir moves into the '60s and '70s spotlight, through her unsteady six-year first marriage to Sonny, with whom she has baby Chastity (later to become Chaz), over whom Cher wins a contentious public custody battle. Then on to her four-year marriage to second husband Gregg Allman, with whom she has son Elijah Sky Blue Allman, and ends on a cliffhanger as she approaches the movie stardom status no one could have anticipated her could achieving.

Early pre-fame teen tales include a gay party with her closeted best buddy Steve, which is raided by cops (this is pre-decriminalisation). The two escape through a bathroom window, pursued by said law enforcement. Back at home, Cher's grandmother grounds her. This is the first we read of this future gay icon being surrounded by her tribe, although she has already noted being around them through childhood, her mother being in movies and therefore friends with many in the industry.

After living with Bono for some time, he arrives home one day, overhears her singing to the radio, and is surprised she can belt out any old tune. She soon hangs out with Sonny at Phil Spector's recording sessions in Hollywood's Gold Star Studios, initially as a sidekick and observer, then as an unpaid last minute backup vocalist when a regular doesn't show. 'I was utterly clueless,' she writes.

Encouraged by Sonny, she perseveres and records backing tracks with The Ronettes ('Be My Baby') and The Righteous Brothers (her background tones immortalised on 'You've Lost That Loving Feeling', officially deemed the most-played song on American radio and television in the 20th century) until ultimately forming her breakthrough Sonny & Cher duo with Bono.

'I Got you Babe' is a smash 1965 hit, but the scope of opportunity for furtherance seems limited. Advised by industry peers to try the London scene, the pair becomes globally famous via headlines upon being refused accommodation at the Hilton Hotel, due to their hippie-chic clothing. This gave them the ultimate global publicity that no hired PR manager could ever have pulled off.

Sonny writes Cher's 1967 solo hit 'Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)' as she slowly starts to achieve solo vocal recognition, with her distinctive androgynous contralto voice and exotic semi-Armenian visage (inherited from her biological father), though the pair remain united onstage and off for the time being.

A string of the duo's hits followed, peaking with 1967's 'The Beat Goes On', then tapering off in sales as the pair strove to reinvent themselves in this rapidly changing countercultural era, of which they would become historically emblematic.

Low dive cabaret gigs would at time keep the wolves from the door, while the pair moved toward their more glamourised '70s TV variety show phase with The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour – their touring club act had, by chance and from practical necessity, morphed from pure song rendition to inserting whacky spousal sparring jibes in an attempt to get just any reaction from inimical regional club audiences, some comprising less than a handful, some so untrendy they had never heard of them, and others who saw them as yesterday's news.

Ditching their old hippie rags for Bob Mackie's glitzier creations (Cher's at first less revealing at Bono's husbandly insistence), their TV show would evolve, post-divorce, into Cher's own show, Cher (in which she and Mackie were able to use far sexier designs, sans Bono) before the friendly divorcees reunited onscreen for later '70s The Sonny & Cher Show.

But this all unfolds later in the memoir, so reader patience is required.

Meanwhile, Cher's Swinging Sixties anecdotes, when she first tastes fame, are delicious. There's the two-page much touted one about Cher and Sonny attending Salvadore Dali's NYC art studio, with Sonny's bestie Francis Ford Coppola. Dali is cleaning up after an orgy and Cher picks up a mechanically moving painted rubber fish she finds wedged behind her seat cushion. Thinking it a child's toy, she comments on its beauty, only for Dali to explain it is a vibrator.

Dali's assistant, Franco-American artist Ultra Violet, sits alongside Cher. 'She [Ultra Violet] was wearing a man's shirt and tie with a velvet skirt. She sat next to me and, saying nothing, repeatedly tapped my leg with her cane. If she does that again, I thought, I'm going to smack her.'

As would be expected, there is much priceless namedropping of idols of the era, e.g. 'Jimi Hendrix's name was added to a long roll call of talented musicians, singers, and industry experts who had died so-called rock-and-roll deaths in the late Sixties. Among them were the angelic Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, and Brian Epstein.'

She recalls meeting up-and-coming musicians like Mick Jagger and Dolly Parton, and drolly sets records straight on her disputed relationships. For example, the tabloids 'claimed I was dating Elvis and Robert Redford. Two men I'd never even met, although they'd have made great bookends (insert tongue in cheek).'

As industry associates and audiences began noticing Cher to be more the standout talent than Sonny, the once adoring husband becomes increasingly more unfaithful and controlling. In a moment of anger, Sonny spins her around and pushes her against their wall. 'I'd been beaten as a kid,' she writes, 'and I wasn't going to be beaten as an adult. Staring into his eyes, I said, "Let me tell you something. If you ever touch me like this again, I will leave your ass and it'll be the last time you ever see me."'

Years later, Cher asks marital advice of Lucille ball, who had ditched ex-husband Desi Arnaz: 'I told her, "Lucy, I want to leave Sonny and you're the only one I know that's ever been in this same situation. What should I do?"

'She told me, "fuck him, you're the one with the talent."'

Still more years later Tina Turner, a guest with notoriously abusive husband Ike on Cher's TV show, quietly asks her in a dressing room: 'How did you leave him?'

'I just walked out and kept going,' replies Cher.

Meanwhile, amid divorce proceedings, Cher learns how Sonny had made her legally an employee of a company 95% owned by Sonny and 5% by his lawyer, and that she was contracted to work exclusively for that company. Record executive David Geffen, with whom Cher had begun a relationship, helped her escape Sonny's underhand contractual ties. She divulges to the reader:

'There was something inside him that I could never understand, something that took him from being this fabulous, funny guy to being someone who would take everything from me.'

But as we all know, Cher is a cool and forgiving soul, and no one spoke more fondly of Sonny Bono than she did after his sudden 1998 death.

Whatever the mixed reactions to The Memoir Part 1, and whatever your take on her musical evolution, it's impossible to not like this superstar's frank and courageous dialogue, even if numerous ghostwriters and an editor have transcribed and repeatedly reworded it – Cher herself, has obviously listened to the audiobook and given it her final approval, so it can't be that far removed from her original 'voice' as some have asserted.

The Memoir Part 2 may be the great decider, covering more recent pop history, which more readers will have lived through, while moving into Cher's Broadway acting and Oscar-winning movie career.

History tells us she will move to New York to study acting with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, but skip enrolment after auditioning for and being cast in Robert Altman's Broadway play Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. She will win an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, be presented with Kennedy Centre Honour, be inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and earn a seemingly endless list of honorary accolades.

However, as the Goddess of Pop is known for not overly blowing her own horn ('There are a million people more talented than me who struggle to make it and will never be famous,' she writes, 'I’ve always thought that whether you get a break or not is purely down to luck'), there is rumoured to be some behind-scenes-trepidation of her second instalment ending up in a similar vein to her first – involving more personal trivia than career sensation – for which she has been critiqued.

And so, for this next instalment, the most devout Cherists await with bated breath. Meanwhile I, for one, loved this great telling of an exemplary human being and supreme entertainer. Cher is a living inspiration. 

My review of Kids, Wait Till You Hear This, by Liza Minnelli

Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!

by Liza Minnelli

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Liza Minnelli is a name synonymous with such a range of topics:

From the old Hollywood she was born into as the sole child of director Vincente Minnelli and silver screen star Judy Garland. 

To being among the entertainment industry's rare EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) winners.

Her outstanding showmanship that stood tall alongside giants like Charles Aznavour, Chita Rivera and rat pack bros Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

Her globally acclaimed performances from the London Palladium to Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall, Broadway and Las Vegas.

Her fiercely loyal LGBTQI+ following, once fondly nicknamed 'friends of Dorothy', who know her as the 'daughter of Dorothy'.

Her run of celebrity marriages, including to gay 'Boy from Oz' Peter Allen.

And, of course, her very public struggles with substance use disorder (SUD).

Long ago, she strove to step out from the shadow of her legendary mother, Judy Garland. But those days are far behind her as she reaches her eighth decade of life – double what Judy survived before her accidental overdose death in her forties, which is widely believed to have been the final trigger of the 1969 Stonewall riots that gave birth to modern gay rights movement.

Thick-skinned yet sensitive, Minnelli has stared down ridicule and contempt for most of her working life, including a string of unkind comedy sketch impersonators, while soaking up adoration as a role model for more positive drag queens.

Her closest friends and mentors have included lionised musical duo Kander and Ebb, 'Ol Blue Eyes' Sinatra, late greats Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson, fashion designer Halston and Cabaret movie co-stars Joel Gray and Marisa Berenson. Her godparents were musical royalty Ira Gershwin and Kay Thomson. 

It seems almost inevitable that some will forever knock her down, while she picks herself up, dusts herself off and starts all over again. Humiliation has inadvertently become part of her persona, an occupational hazard. And while most of the media legacy's reviews of this long-awaited memoir are largely kind, there are those few who cannot help themselves from having a stab.

Yes, this book is a collaboration between an entourage including her lifelong best friend Michael Feinstein (musical archivist and interpreter of the Great American Songbook) in conversation with whom she spent twelve years recording this memoir via taped conversations. The cover title clearly includes: 'As told to Michael Feinstein'.

Assisting is bestselling author Josh Getlin and Pulitzer Prize winner Heidi Evans. Minnelli's end acknowledgements cover five printed pages, stipulating in no uncertain terms that this book could never have happened without all these people.

So why, oh why, must her diehard critics harp on about every little thing they can drum up, from everyday Amazon troll stabs like 'what a downer' to The New York Times critic Alexandra Jacobs calling it:

'… more compact and circumspect than Barbra Streisand's My Name Is Barbra and Cher's Cher: The Memoir having been plucked, buffed and powder-puffed within an inch of its long life by Feinstein during the 12-year writing process …'

(I had read both of the above memoirs and did not find that negative comparison to be my experience.)

Where is the root of this vigilant hatred, we must ask, on reading Liza's book for ourselves? The only possible answers I could think up were: 'its personal', 'it's fashionable' or 'haters gonna hate'. Like, where do these naysayers get their kicks?

My own reading of it was done in just over a week of very late nights. Admittedly, I'm a lifelong admirer of her talent and personal resilience.

I found parallels between this and veteran Broadway star Lillian Roth's devastating 1954 autobiography I'll Cry Tomorrow which was at the time described as a 'brutally frank' depiction of Roth's alcoholism and which, having broken barriers about celebrity addiction, sold over 7 million copies in 20 languages before being adapted into an Oscar-winning 1955 biopic starring Susan Hayward.

Roth was, at the time, condemned by the newly formed 12-step recovery system for 'breaking her anonymity', i.e. attracting attention to a name who may well 'bust' (relapse) and so draw disrepute to the 'programme'. She did! And so lived to regret it.

Liza's frankness about her recovery journey is clearly aimed at those still suffering from substance abuse disorder (SUD) in the vein of 12-step programmers' well known 'love of one alcoholic for another'. In other words, she aims to use her suffering to help others rise above theirs. What could be kinder, humbler or more well-meant?

She crosses privacy boundaries she had never before crossed, while retaining an admirable level of dignity – there are lines she will not cross when it comes to the privacy of others. 

For this she has been criticised by words like 'circumspect', again by the NYT's Alexandra Jacobs who sarcastically calls Liza 'America’s sequined sweetheart' – I mean, has this critic actually researched her subject? Maybe catty put-downs just attract more clicks.

Liza Minnelli's brick-thick tome is a 420-page compelling, revealing, brutally honest self-study. The intended legacy of a great star, herself the end line of great stars.

I loved it more than I have many others in its genre in recent years.

Her descriptions of a life we can only guess at are vivid. Her honesty is that of one who sees more years behind than ahead of herself. Her integrity glows from the page.

Never intended to be some literary achievement, this is the intimate telling of a life the world has wondered about for more than a half-century.

Just enjoy and appreciate it. I did. Love you, Liza!!!

My review of Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys

Wide Sargasso Sea

by Jean Rhys

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Let me first say that this literary masterpiece deserved every last ounce of global acclaim that it won - so special that no film adaptation has come anywhere near to the book. This is the perfect novel, in form, in cadence, in concept. Pure magic.

That said, this glittering tome is my least favourite, plot-wise, of Jean's novels. Maybe because it is a standalone, with little in common with any of her other, less appraised works.

She herself saw the irony that this atypical epic, published in her dotage, from handwritten scrawl, was what it took to deem her a literary luminary. Of all the plaudits and her prestigious literary award, she said only, in pure Jean Rhys form: 'It came too late.' Only her old cult following could appreciate this understatement. For too many long decades she had been unfairly underestimated and shunned by highbrow critics and readership masses alike.

Rhys had lived in obscurity for decades after her previous work, Good Morning, Midnight, was published in 1939, with publishers presuming her dead. Wide Sargasso Sea, her astonishing and unanticipated comeback, became her most successful novel, winning her the 1967 WH Smith Literary Award, and seeing her later appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). 

A prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, this is the backstory of Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole heiress, from the time of her Caribbean youth to her unhappy marriage to an unnamed English gentleman (implied as Jane Eyre's 'Mr. Rochester'). The story elaborates on how her captor-husband came to move Antoinette to England, rename her Bertha, falsely declare her insane and lock her away in his attic, where she then actually descends into madness.

Rhys uses multiple narrative voices (Antoinette's, Rochester's, and Grace Poole's), masterfully merging this plot with that of Jane Eyre. For the most part, however, protagonist Antoinette relates her life story from colonial childhood, to arranged marriage, to her attic room confines under servant Grace Poole's watch in [Rochester mansion] Thornfield Hall.

The novel begins circa 1834 after the Abolition Act ended slavery in the British Empire. Part One, set in Jamaica's Coulibri, is narrated by Antoinette who reflects, fragmentally, on her childhood, her mother's mental instability and her mentally impaired brother's tragic death.

Part Two alternates between perspectives of Antoinette and her unnamed English husband during their honeymoon in Dominica's Granbois. Antoinette's childhood nurse, Christophine, travels with the newlyweds as servant. We witness the advent of Antoinette's mental downfall after her husband receives a malicious blackmailing letter from one Daniel, an acquisitive native, demanding hush money and claiming to be Antoinette's distant illegitimate brother. For good measure, Daniel also alleges Antoinette carries a hereditary half-madness.

Loyal Christophine, resenting the groom's semi-belief in Daniel's crazed claims, aggravates matters with her open hostility. Perplexed and frustrated, Antoinette's new husband, feeling alienated in this foreign land, eventually lashes out, becoming openly unfaithful to his bride. Our heroine's swelling paranoia and despair at her failing marriage unbalance her already frail emotional state.

Part Three, the novel's shortest section, is from the perspective of Antoinette, now renamed Bertha. She is confined in the attic of Thornfield Hall which she calls the 'Great House'. We follow her relationship with servant-guard Grace Poole, as Antoinette's captor-husband hides her from the world. Promising to see her more, he pursues relationships with other women (eventually with his new young governess, Jane Eyre). In a final act of despair, Antoinette/Bertha decides to take her own life.

Her magnum opus, this is not your typical Jean Rhys, not that younger, wilder Jean her select following knew and loved, but it has nevertheless been justifiably hailed as one of the most important works of English literature ever penned.

Anyone who reads would be a fool to pass on this one.

My review of Letters 1931-1966, by Jean Rhys, Francis Wyndham (Editor), Diana Melly (Editor)

Letters 1931-1966

by Jean Rhys, Francis Wyndham (Editor), Diana Melly (Editor) 

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I was bought this as a birthday gift by someone who knew my fanaticism for Jean Rhys. This intimate glimpse into the personal comments of my all-time favourite writer had me mesmerised from start to finish.

The letters include those from 1931, when she was recently estranged from her first husband French-Dutch journalist-songwriter (and spy) Jean Lenglet. Jean was still enjoying the acclaim of her first three books, The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927) Postures/Quartet (1929) and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931).

Like a fly on Jean's various walls, we watch her bumpy life unravel until the 1966 death of her of her third and final husband, solicitor Max Hamer, who had spent much of their marriage jailed for fraud. Jean was now a frail old woman reduced to a life of obscurity, alone in her ramshackle West Country home. Publicly long forgotten and presumed dead, her books were mostly out of print. 

She was, however, on the brink of major rediscovery with the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, which she had spent years drafting and perfecting. Unlike any of her earlier works, this final tome was a fictional perspective of the 'madwoman in the attic' from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. It would win Jean the prestigious 1967 WH Smith Literary Award, of which she famously said: 'It has come too late'.

Like all Jean's penned words published or not, this is like sitting all alone with her, listening to a voice that speaks only the pure, haunting truth.

A remarkable, intimate journey through her life that validates and authenticates the integrity of everything she had published and explains so much more about her than we, as diehard fans, could have known.

The most beautiful birthday gift I was ever given. Truly. It will never be allowed out of my house.

As an afterthought, it's interesting that those reviewers who don't "get" the Jean Rhys letters tend to be American, whereas those who do appear to be British.

My review of Ungrateful Daughters: The Stuart Princesses Who Stole Their Father's Crown, by Maureen Waller

Ungrateful Daughters: The Stuart Princesses Who Stole Their Father's Crown

by Maureen Waller 

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Interesting account of the end of the Stuarts in England. Until the last century there remained vehement opponents of the switch to Hanoverian rule.

James II's daughters, Mary and Anne, were Anne Hyde's daughters. They resented their stepmother, Mary of Modena, and were so bitter at her baby son's arrival (cue pushing towards their throne) that a family row ensued, escalating into a coup against their father aided by public fears and anti-Catholic prejudices.

James II, as Charles II's younger brother, had not always been expected to rule. The latter, however, left no legitimate heirs. Only when James came under greater scrutiny as king did his Catholicism come into much question publicly, the matter having been kept discrete like many sensitive royal details.

Malicious rumours erupted concerning the baby prince's legitimacy, the harshest being that he was an imposter smuggled into the palace in a bed-warming pan after Mary's real baby died. The likelihood, or not, of this is examined, as is the issue of post-reformation England's then governmental power mongers (and proletariat) dreading any return to a Catholic monarchy. The last had been Bloody Mary Tudor, under whose watch 283 Protestants had been executed for heresy, most by burning.

James II's baby heir, James Francis Edward Stuart, later to become nicknamed the Old Pretender, was taken to France by his mother who feared for his life, and kept by his cousin Louis XIV of France.

James II then fled England for his safety when it became apparent that his Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange would invade at the request of James' detractors. James' baby son was railroaded from the succession by Mary and William. That couple ruled jointly until William died, leaving just Queen Mary II. With no offspring, Mary's demise left Queen Anne to wind up the Stuart rule. Her disastrous run of 17 pregnancies left no living offspring either. So came their Hanoverian cousins, descended from the same Stuart grandparents via the maternal line.

These two 'Ungrateful Daughters' of James II, as the title suggests, are not portrayed sympathetically. This may not be author bias, but more likely the way many have remembered them. Neither went down in history as hugely popular monarchs, although Anne's reign saw nationalistic development, notably the 1707 Acts of Union whereby her realms of England and Scotland became united as Great Britain, creating Europe's largest free trade area.

Ungrateful Daughters is an insightful account of the 1688 Glorious Revolution and two rather troubled and troublesome sisters, neither of which became greatly revered. Anne became more iconic than Mary but without attaining much personal popularity with all those around her. Political and diplomatic achievements of Anne's governments, and the absence of constitutional conflict between herself and parliament, indicate that she chose ministers and exercised her prerogatives wisely. Her reign marked an increase in the influence of ministers and a decrease in the influence of the Crown

The Stuarts have been tagged a jinxed dynasty, with Mary of Scots and her grandson Charles I's executions, the latter's triggering England's republic. Then, after the long awaited and greatly hailed Restoration, Charles II's morally lax court attracted fresh disrepute; his many controversial bastards but no legitimate heirs signalled the beginning of the end for these Stuarts. Two unsuccessful invasions and coups by leftover Stuarts were plotted after the Hanoverian branch was called in: the 1708 Jacobite Rising, led by the Old Pretender, and the 1745 Jacobite Uprising led by his son, the Young Pretender (Bonnie Prince Charlie).

An important era to study in piecing together how the UK got today's royals, whose convoluted lineage runs from William the Conqueror ... via the tragic forbear of these very Stuarts: Mary Queen of Scots (and her Hanoverian descendants). Maureen Waller makes the characters and their motives accessible, coherent and dramatic without switching from meticulous documentation to melodrama.

Well-crafted high calibre biography.

My review of Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion by Anne Somerset

Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion 

by Anne Somerset

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

An excellent biography of a monarch often written off as 'too dull' by fans of the more popular icons, such as Tudors, etc.

In fact, as we see in this well documented account, Queen Anne had her idiosyncrasies, increasingly apparent throughout her life. Anne Somerset painstakingly draws out for us a studied portrait of a woman of distinct character.

Stolid, at times timid and withdrawn, at others formidably strident, Anne had a good heart and a wise head on her shoulders. Usually kept well cordoned off from her succinct 'constitutional' instinct, she had a closely guarded impetuosity, particularly around close relationships with female favourites. (Crass sensationalism has even seen her tagged a closet case. Whether or not she was, this biography transcends such silliness.)

Important diplomatic and nationalistic milestones were laid under Anne's watch. She left more than her predecessors to her government, adopting the tendency to 'sign off' more than dictate. This was the hallmark of constitutional monarchy, notably reviewed under Anne's Restoration uncle Charles II's succession, after the decade long Interregnum that followed Charles I's execution for being too high and mighty.

Anne's gender eased along this sensitive process, the woman often leaving big business to the men who did her bidding. Even so, she had her limits, would not always be pushed around and inconsistently put her foot down when her convictions demanded.

Her personal spending choices on select favourites drew harsh criticism from jealous insiders and other agenda driven detractors. She nevertheless usually stuck to her guns, displaying a strong personal loyalty which some dismissed as a weakness. This view of her as weak was compounded by her ever-ailing health.

Her less dictatorial, more constitutional ruling style, merged with these other features, sometimes left her seeming indecisive. This was a falsehood: had she been of intrinsically indecisive character she would never have so virulently fuelled the flames of the Glorious Revolution that saw her father removed from the throne.

Rather than being weak and indecisive, Anne was shrewd, wise and cautious, having seen what could happen to high-handed monarchs whose undoing was their rash and outlandish mistakes. In this feature, along with her stubborn side, she perhaps resembled Elizabeth I, but Anne had no such heart of fire, retreating into the shadows of her solitude more than the great Gloriana ever would have. Anne was immeasurably more contained, more modest, as dictated by these times where royalty itself walked a tightrope and republicanism still loomed large.

Stone statues and such iconography of her adorn great British heritage sites, confirming her importance in the long royal line linking today's royals to William the Conqueror. Though not every monarch has enjoyed Anne's acclamation, many were more greatly revered.

Anne Somerset breaths air into this frail and obese woman's lungs, bringing to us live and in person this great-great-granddaughter of romantic tragedienne Mary, Queen of Scots.

Enjoyed this biography very much, about the last ruler of what was not my favourite dynasty to read on.