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Books : Biography : Historical : Britain : Social & Urban History
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Georgiana Spencer was, in a sense, an 18th-century "It Girl". She came from one of England's richest and most landed families, and married into another. She was, beautiful, sensitive and extravagant. Acquainted fairly young with Charles James Fox, her move from parties to Parties led her to become the intimate of ministers and princes, and she canvassed assiduously for the Whig cause, most famously in the Westminster election of 1784. By turns she was caricatured and fawned on by the press, and she provided the inspiration for Lady Teazle in Sheridan's School For Scandal. But, luckily for her biographer, she also had weaknesses that were to taint her life. As gin gripped the masses, so gambling enthralled the aristocracy. By 1784 Georgiana owed "many, many, many thousands", and the creditors she acquired dogged her until her death, but the sterility of her marriage meant that she never came close to disclosing the magnitude of her debts. Amanda Foreman describes astutely the mess that was personal relationships for the aristocratic subculture (Georgiana and the Duke engaged for many years in a ménage à trois with Lady Elizabeth Fraser, who inveigled her way into his bed and her heart). She is, by her own admission, a little in love with her subject, which can lead to occasional lapses of perspective, but generally it adds zest to a narrative built on, rather than burdened by, scholarship, that is at once accessible and learned. An impressive debut, in every sense. --David Vincent
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When the eminent novelist and biographer Peter Ackroyd finished writing London: The Biography, he almost immediately had a heart attack, such was the effort of his 800-page work about the "human body" that is this most fascinating of cities. And not just any human body either, but "envisaged in the form of a young man with his arms outstretched in a gesture of liberation... it embodies the energy and exaltation of a city continually beating in great waves of progress and of confidence."Probably there is no one better placed than Ackroyd--the author of mammoth lives of Dickens and Blake, and novels such as Hawksmoor and Dan Leno and the Lime House Golem which set singular characters against the backdrop of a city constantly shifting in time--to write such a rich, sinewy account of "Infinite London".
Ackroyd's London is no mere chronology. Its chapters take on such varied themes as drinking, sex, childhood, poverty, crime and punishment, sewage, food, pestilence and fire, immigration, maps, theatre and war. We learn that gin was "the demon of London for half a century", and that "it has been estimated that in the 1740s and 1750s there were 17,000 'gin-houses'." Fleet Street was an area known for its "violent delights" where "a 14-year-old boy, only 18 inches high, was to be seen in 1702 at a grocer's shop called the Eagle and Child by Shoe Lane." By the mid 19th century "London had become known as the greatest city on earth." By 1939 "one in five of the British population had become a Londoner."
Though London's chapters vary meaning that it can be dipped into at random, Ackroyd is employing a skilful and continuous theme throughout, which constantly links past and present--the similarities of children's games in Lambeth in 1910 and 1999; the obsession with time--"in 21st-century London time rushes forward and is everywhere apparent", while in 18th-century London the church clock of Newgate "regulated the times of hanging." Above all, he insists that the "dark secret life" of the metropolis is as relevant today as it was in perhaps its most appropriate period, Victorian London.
Again and again Ackroyd returns to the image of London as a living organism, hence his use of the word "biography" in the title. At once awed by and intimate with this "ubiquitous" city, he stresses that "it can be located nowhere in particular... its circumference is everywhere." --Catherine Taylor
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Stephen Halliday describes the writing of this book as "a labour of love", but it would take a strong stomach to love some of the material he includes about the 19th- century Thames. Two million people poured their sewage directly into the river, "more filth was continuously adding to it," noted a contemporary, "until the Thames became absolutely pestilential". In the 1850s the river was black, and in the hot summer of 1858 the stink was so unbearable that the Houses of Parliament were driven from the chamber. But a hero emerges from this smelly mess, Sir Joseph Bazalgette, a Victorian engineer of prodigious energy and foresight, who "turned the Thames from the filthiest to the cleanest metropolitan river in the world, which it remains." Halliday is indeed a little in love with his subject, Bazalgette, but it is easy to see why.The construction of the system of sanitation on which London still relies an enormous undertaking, but Bazalgette saw it through with tenacity and a kind of engineering genius. He saved more lives (by freeing the city from cholera) than any single Victorian public official. This book is a small marvel, elegantly written, generously illustrated and a fascinating insight into the guts of London. --Adam Roberts
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Alive with the details of upper-class life in the 1700s, and sparkling with extracts from the letters of Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox and their offspring, Aristocrats: The Illustrated Companion to the Television Series takes the reader on a Grand Tour of their 18th-century experience. Stella Tillyard's completely new text (the series Aristocrats is based on her highly acclaimed book of the same name), breathes intelligence and accessibility. Divided into themed chapters: Beginnings and Marriages; Town Life; Country Life; Travel and Endings, Aristocrats is gorgeously illustrated with informatively captioned paintings, photos of artefacts and stills from the television series. Helpfully, the book kicks off with a Dramatis Personae section, which explains who everyone is, tells us how they relate to each other, what they were like and fits them snugly into their context like the elegant, idiosyncratic pieces of a lavish three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Throughout, Tillyard's affectionately vivid prose combines with the stunning illustrations to recreate the opulence in which the Lennox sisters lived, loved, married, took lovers, raised children, survived scandals, played at architecture and design, and lived high politics.A book which combines gossip, art and history to terrific effect. Buy it even if you've read Tillyard's original book. Actually--buy two copies. Keep one and give one to someone you love as a present. --Lisa Gee
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To what extent did the outcome of the Second World War turn on the two very different personalities who led the two major combatant nations? This intriguing question is the subject of Andrew Roberts' Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership, published to tie in with the television series of the same name. Roberts, the author of the prize-winning Salisbury: Victorian Titan and, more recently, the highly acclaimed Napoleon and Wellington, sets out to identify the ingredients of successful leadership in peacetime and wartime.The first half of the book takes us through the lives of the two men up to 1939, showing how both men had a strong sense of destiny and mission--indeed both put out a sort of mission statement (Churchill in his 1900 novel Savrola; Hitler in his Mein Kampf). Both men also had compelling powers of oratory and a carefully contrived political persona built around props (Churchill's cigar and homburg hat, Hitler's plain uniform), hideaway homes (Chartwell and the Berghof) and careful public relations. The second half of the book brings out their major differences during the war. Inevitably, Churchill's people-management skills and ability to listen to advice won out over Hitler's control-freakery and over-reliance on sycophants.
This is not one of Andrew Roberts' better books. It is not a particularly sophisticated analysis of the dynamics of leadership, and the story of the clash of these two titans has been told so often--most recently by John Lukacs--that there is not a lot more to be added. Roberts does provide some new information on Churchill's use of secret intelligence, but otherwise this is familiar fare--a tale certainly worth being told again, but perhaps not deserving the great puff on the dust jacket. --Miles Taylor
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