Book review – English history
Caroline of Ansbach: the best of the Hanoverians
It can sometimes seem — unfairly but irresistibly — as if the sole function of the myriad Lilliputian German statelets…
The people’s prince
In Pepys’s famous words, James, Duke of Monmouth was ‘the most skittish, leaping gallant that ever I saw, always in…
Courting Sultana Isabel
The idea for a mechanical cock was never going to work. In 1595 the English ambassador to Constantinople, Edward Barton,…
After Albert
A new, revisionist biography argues that it was only after her husband’s death that Queen Victoria found her true self. Jane Ridley is impressed
