RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Apart from being a wonderful biography – indeed, the best royal biography to be published since James Pope-Hennessy’s Queen Mary (1959) – this book makes a revelatory distinction between two modes of being ... George V’s life, and that of his wife Queen Mary (Princess May of Teck) are, by contrast, rivetingly interesting when seen through Ridley’s lens. You yearn for every little detail ... Ridley does not try to whitewash George the Ordinary, nor to absolve him from cowardice, for example when, on the advice of his private secretary Lord Stamfordham, he declined to offer the Romanovs asylum in Britain after the Revolution ... Ridley does not disappoint those addicts who wish to reread their favourite king’s oft-quoted mots ... this book sheds an entirely new light on both George V and his consort ... Jane Ridley persuades us that their tactful handling of the many crises of the reign paved the way for the stable constitutional monarchy that persists to this day.
Alathea Fitzalan Howard
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)A compulsive diarist, Alathea provides an unforgettable picture of those innocent, harmless times. While giving us a glimpse of the princesses’ early years, this diary – skilfully edited by Celestria Noel – also offers the most wonderful record of a world and a mindset now as extinct as the dodo ... Thank goodness Alathea’s own museum – this diary – is intact and we can now observe, with the curiosity of travellers in the Amazon rainforests stumbling across a hitherto undisturbed tribe, the attitudes, hopes, heartbreaks and vulnerable dreams of a prewar aristocrat whose like we shall never look upon again ... Alathea is so old-fashioned, and so authentically old-style Catholic, that she makes Brideshead Revisited seem progressivist. To read of her life at Cumberland Lodge, or back at Arundel Castle, seat of the Dukes of Norfolk, is to feel that the Reformationnever happened.
Ingrid Seward
PanThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Prince Albert saw no reason to conceal the fact that he was a clever German. In consequence, he was hated in England. Philip learnt his lesson from his forebear, and cleverly hid both nationality and cleverness. As for his range of talents, he would have been a much more interesting monarch than his wife, but the end would almost certainly have been a republic. Since his wife became Head of State, it has been a stultifyingly boring life. But here is yet another boring book about it. Ingrid Seward, for more than thirty years editor of Majesty magazine (was it for this the clay grew tall?), must have banked, literally, on her subject’s death coming before the book’s completion. Alas, she has had to provide a hasty ending, replacing what would have been a moving description of the State Funeral with a few tastefully chosen words ... scissors-and-paste rehearsal of a familiar story.
Hilary Spurling
MixedThe Times Literary Suplement\"... [Spurling] has produced a richly enjoyable book, though it is not quite what some of us were expecting. You might say that it is a biography of A Dance to the Music of Time rather than of its author ... Once [Powell\'s novel] sequence has been finished, however, Spurling stops, conveying the last thirty years of Powell’s life in a mere fourteen pages. Many of the friends he made during this period – and Powell was a gregarious man – receive either a passing mention or none at all. This approach could readily be defended, the most interesting thing about an author – or an author who is any good – being the work and not the life. On the other hand, it misses some of the flavour of the man ... Furthermore, either because Spurling was a close friend of Powell in later life, or because he simply was a sphinx-like figure, he remains impenetrable here ... Having said where Spurling’s biography is lacking, it remains to say how richly and movingly enjoyable it is...\
Stephen Greenblatt
RaveThe Wall Street JournalNeither the Hebrew version nor the Sumerian original seem to have carried any suggestion that there would some day come a second Adam who would restore immortality to the human race, and Mr. Greenblatt confines to an endnote St. Paul’s idea of Christ as the second Adam. He devotes more space to the reinterpretation of Pauline theology by Augustine, whom in his portrayal originally saw the story as an embarrassingly primitive fable but in time made it central to his sophisticated conception of original sin and ultimate redemption. Mr. Greenblatt is especially eloquent on the influence of this story on the early modern imagination ... he begins his survey by stating that 'an insistence on the story’s literal truth—an actual Adam and Eve in an actual garden—became one of the cornerstones of Christian orthodoxy.' Very many, perhaps a majority, would nowadays agree with Mr. Greenblatt, but I am not convinced ... The richness of the Adam and Eve story is, in our own day, set against the story created by Darwin of the evolved ape. Both are powerful images in our brains, and most educated people believe, or try to believe, in the latter. What Mr. Greenblatt’s wonderfully rich, detailed, humorous and imaginative survey reveals is the sheer wealth of the biblical mythology and how it continues to raise questions that Darwinism doesn’t answer.
