Social history
Searching for Coco on the Côte d’Azur
Anne de Courcy, an escapee from tabloid journalism, has become a polished historian of British high society in the 20th…
Desperate mothers, abandoned babies: the tragic story of London’s foundlings
One of the oddest of Bloomsbury’s event venues must be the Foundling Museum. The handsome building on Coram’s Fields houses…
Cracking jokes with Dr Johnson
I cast my Readers under two general Divisions, the Mercurial and the Saturnine. The first are the gay part of…
The minefield of mime: ‘halt’ to an American signifies ‘hi’ to an Arab
You may have read about this during the Iraq war. A group of local people approach an American position. A…
How any mother — or baby — survived childbirth before the 20th century is astonishing
Between 1300 and 1900 few things were more dangerous than giving birth. For poor and rich, the mortality rate was…
High society and low gossip: the journals of Kenneth Rose
Kenneth Rose was gossip columnist by appointment to the aristocracy and gentry. He was, of course, a snob — nobody…
The pagan feast of Christmas
This book, an excellent history of Christmas, made me think of a Christmas cartoon strip I once saw in Viz…
The pleasures of reading aloud
‘I have nothing to doe but work and read my Eyes out,’ complained Anne Vernon in 1734, writing from her…
The feast before the famine
If you had the resources, Georgian Ireland must have been a very agreeable place in which to live. It was…
All guns blazing
Once, both police and criminals in Britain routinely did without guns. How did that happen? And why did it change?
No satisfaction
For Stuart Maconie fans, this book might sound as if it’ll be his masterpiece. In his earlier memoirs and travelogues,…
Change and decay in all around I see
The Unwinding is a rather classy addition to the thriving genre of American apocalypse porn. The basic thesis can be…
