Versailles
Magnificent: V&A’s Marie Antoinette Style reviewed
This exhibition will be busy. You’ll shuffle behind fellow pilgrims. But it’ll be worthwhile. It’s a tour de force that…
How French absolutism powered a techno-progressive revolution
The Enlightenment is back. Despite the best efforts of the past decade of handwringing about cultural imperialism and wailing over…
Few rulers can have rejoiced in a less appropriate sobriquet than Augustus the Strong
The 17th-century Elector of Saxony was notoriously vain and incompetent, and his reckless bid for the Polish crown was disastrous for all concerned
The glory and the misery of Louis XIV’s France
I was flicking through an old copy of The Spectator the other day, one of the issues containing contributors’ ‘Christmas…
Impure thoughts
Spoiler alerts aren’t normally required for reviews of Shakespeare — but perhaps I’d better issue one before saying that in…
Women and song
Just a few weeks ago, Germany’s VAN magazine published an interview with the composer Olga Neuwirth. In it she describes…
Death watch
At the beginning of the summer of 1715 Louis XIV complained of a pain in the leg. In mid-August gangrene…
Cold frames
A Little Chaos is a period drama directed by Alan Rickman and starring Kate Winslet as a woman charged to…
Daring a fleeting smile
In 1787 critics of the Paris Salon were scandalised by a painting exhibited by Mme Vigée Le Brun. The subject…
The cardinal and the con artist
You usually know where you are with a book that promises the story ‘would violate the laws of plausibility’ if…
Voices in my head
I did not mean to snort so loudly. There I was watching the amazing Simon Russell Beale in King Lear…
