RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)She brings an immense allusive range, from Hindu spiritualism to Shakespeare’s Ulysses, while often writing in short, pithy sentences. Similarly, the book contains 114 snack-sized chapters ... Precise.
Catherine Ostler
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)[An] empathetic perspective, combined with rigorous scholarship, to reveal Chudleigh in her full glory, with the last dozen years of her life in Russia, Estonia and France being perhaps the most fascinating ... Catherine Ostler diagnoses much of Chudleigh’s behaviour as \'borderline personality disorder\', which is a plausible but unnecessary attribution, likely to date more quickly than the rest of this excellent book ... Ostler never lets her trial scenes become one-sided. We are rooting for Chudleigh, yet she is no innocent ... Ostler has undertaken impressive international archival research and always follows the money meticulously. The desperate, ordinary people hurt by aristocrats living on credit never get the space they deserve in such biographies, but at least the omission accurately conveys the myopia of those pre-revolutionary elites ... The book’s spritely, wry tone is a pleasure to read throughout. In the early chapters, it felt cinematic almost to a fault ... By the end, however, I was fantasy-casting the surely inevitable adaptation and in awe of Catherine Ostler’s thoughtful portraiture, both of Elizabeth Chudleigh and her century.
