Richard Bartholomew (Author of 30 Second Religion (Hardback) /anglais)

Richard Bartholomew started reading Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jun 01, 2026 12:22AM · like
Richard Bartholomew rated a book it was amazing The Jameses: A Family Narrative by R.W.B. Lewis	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
There are only two Jameses who are generally known to the educated public, and even then many people who read (or watch adaptations of) Henry James don’t know that his brother was the famous philosopher and psychologist William James, while students ...more
May 01, 2026 04:05AM · like · see review
Richard Bartholomew rated a book really liked it This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World by Andrea di Robilant	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
In the mid-sixteenth century, a sensational three-volume work published in Venice by Tommaso Giunti transformed Europe's understanding of its place in the wider world. Delle navigationi et viaggi, or "Journeys and Navigations", with cartography by Gi ...more
Mar 08, 2026 12:06PM · like · see review
Richard Bartholomew rated a book really liked it Monty Python: The Case Against by Robert Hewison	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
As of 2025, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" is among the most popular songs played at funerals in the UK, and jokes from Monty Python's Life of Brian are embedded in the country's popular culture. Meanwhile, one of the film's creators, Micha ...more
Mar 08, 2026 12:02PM · like · see review
Richard Bartholomew rated a book it was amazing The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. III: The Novels by Arthur Conan Doyle	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Arthur Conan Doyle never revealed how he came to meet John Watson, although one theory noted by Leslie Klinger is that it was at the Phoenix Masonic Lodge, which Doyle joined in 1887. Whatever the circumstances, we know that Doyle became Watson’s col ...more
Dec 23, 2025 05:24AM · like · see review
Richard Bartholomew rated a book really liked it The Popish Plot by J.P. Kenyon	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The anti-Catholic "Popish plot" conspiracism that gripped England and Scotland in the late 1670s is synonymous with the name of Titus Oates. However, in this classic account of the affair J.P. Kenyon cautions that although "even today some Catholic a ...more
Dec 21, 2025 12:58AM · like · see review
Richard Bartholomew rated a book really liked it Sidney Bernstein: A biography by Caroline Moorehead	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
For many people in Britain of a certain age, the word "Granada" evokes not the sunshine and medieval romance of city in Spain, but rather the slate tiles and chimney pots of a modest Edwardian terrace under a damp and gloomy sky in the north of Engla ...more
Oct 17, 2025 01:32AM · like · see review
Richard Bartholomew rated a book really liked it Chequers: The Prime Minister's Country House and Its History by Norma Major	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
In October 1917, the First World War had been dragging on for three years, the stagnation epitomised by the ongoing inability to dislodge German forces at Passchendaele. In response, Britain's prime minister, David Lloyd George, invited a party that ...more
Aug 04, 2025 10:43AM · like · see review
Richard Bartholomew rated a book liked it The Making Of Dune by Ed Naha	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
A book about the making of a film that begins with a congratulatory foreword (styled as the "Introduction") by the producer's father is obviously going to be an "approved" account; the author may not have been under instruction to produce PR, but an ...more
Jul 13, 2025 01:04AM · like · see review

Richard Bartholomew started reading

Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries
by Rick Emerson (Goodreads Author)

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The Jameses: A Family Narrative
by R.W.B. Lewis

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There are only two Jameses who are generally known to the educated public, and even then many people who read (or watch adaptations of) Henry James don’t know that his brother was the famous philosopher and psychologist William James, while students There are only two Jameses who are generally known to the educated public, and even then many people who read (or watch adaptations of) Henry James don’t know that his brother was the famous philosopher and psychologist William James, while students who are assigned The Varieties of Religious Experience or some other work of William may not be made aware that he was the sibling of the famous literary writer. Their sister Alice, debilitated for much of her life by illness, has some posthumous fame due to her published diaries, but there were also two younger brothers, Garth and Robertson, who unlike their celebrated older brothers saw action in the Civil War. And Henry James was himself more properly “Henry James Jr” until his writings eclipsed those of his Swedenborg-inspired theologian father, a liberal-minded patriarch whose attitudes towards life were a reaction against his own father, a prosperous merchant and local worthy referred to by Lewis as “William James of Albany” to distinguish him from his grandson.

The Jameses synthesises the lives of all seven individuals, along with details about their relatives, spouses and even to some extent their in-laws (Alice’s domestic partner Katharine Loring also gets her due). Henry James Sr was one of eight children borne by Catharine Barber James (William James of Albany’s third wife, following two early bereavements), and his wife Mary Robertson Walsh had sister, Catherine, who was an important presence in the life of the third generation as “Aunt Kate” (although mentioned only briefly, Henry also had a sister, Ellen, who married the son of Martin Van Buren). Aunt Kate makes it onto the cover of the book, as does Alice Howe Gibbens, who married William James. Lewis’s interest in in-laws even extends to a short appendix about the “strange death” by suicide of Alice Gibben’s father Daniel, who got caught up in a Reconstruction-era corruption scandal.

Lewis’s task required the assimilation of a huge amount of material, including a wealth of family papers both in archives and in private hands, as well as familiarity with a variety of subjects: readers interested primarily in intellectual and literary themes are rewarded with judicious summaries and analyses of Wlliam’s and Henry’s writings, but they may find material about the younger brothers and the Civil War a bit of sidetrack – although the fact of having had two younger siblings who had seen warfare while they had not had some lasting impact on Henry and James. Lewis’ account of their military exploits is also lively, perhaps enhanced by Lewis’s own experience as a veteran of World War II. Alice James’s ailments are a way into the world of nineteenth-century medicine – Lewis does not speculate as to what diagnoses such as “rheumatic gout” actually were, but the symptoms suggest some form of myalgic encephalomyelitis before her final breast cancer. Inevitably, there are some longeurs, such as William James’ interminably introspective (and indecisive) letters to his fiancée and wife (occasionally enlivened with flashes of barely euphemised sexual desire, or tactlessly frank appreciations of other women – particularly the young Pauline Goldmark).

Although Henry Sr inherited just a fraction of his father’s immense wealth, he “is said to have murmured ‘leisured for life’” when a court finally confirmed his entitlement. His son Henry Jr is quoted as saying “we were never in a single case, I think, for two generations, guilty of a stroke of business”, although Lewis sees this as misleading, “for the phenomena of money and business agitated the Jamesian mind… to a degree which it is difficult, or even impossible, to match elsewhere in our literary and intellectual history” (by “our”, of course, Lewis is addressing his fellow American readers rather than compatriots of Charles Dickens). It also overlooks the younger brothers’ post-military business affairs, which were botched – perhaps Henry Jr meant “a stroke of successful business”.

William and of course Henry Jr interacted with many currents of intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic, but the “family narrative” angle means that the primary focus is on the ongoing family dialogue. Even Henry James’s famous friendship with Edith Wharton appears scattered over just a few pages, despite Lewis being the author of a comparably large (and prize-winnng) volume about her. Emerson is sporadic presence; William James studied under Louis Agassiz, and through Emerson he got to meet Herman Grimm (son of one of the brothers) and W.C. Dilthey in Germany. One interesting circle is William James’s association with a group of philosophers in Britain called the “Scratch Eight”, which along with James comprised the “intellectually elusive “ Shadworth Hodgson, Edmund Gurney, James Sully, Leslie Stephen and G. Croom Robertson, the editor of Mind. Gurney, with Henry Sidgwick, were founders of the Society of Psychical Research, a subject with which James became increasingly interested following the death of an infant son; James and his wife Alice were impressed by sessions with the Boston medium Leonora Piper. However, it is disappointing to get only a passing mention of Sigmund Freud, despite the day they spent together shortly before James’ death that is described in Gay’s biography of Freud (reviewed here). Henry James’ correspondence with H.G Wells is quoted, and an encounter with G.K. Chesterton in Rye in Sussex noted, but there is no mention of E.F. Benson.

William and Henry’s habits of transatlantic peregrinations go back to childhood: their father seems to have been restless and frequently moved residence, and 1844 saw the family lease a property in Windsor for the summer: “it was called Frogmore Cottage”, Lewis mentions insouciantly, and although he describes the location he doesn’t seem aware of its fame in Britain or the fact that their landlady ultimately would have been the young Queen Victoria. It was here that Henry Snr suffered what he called (using a Swedenborgian term) a “vastation”, later described as “a perfectly insane and adject terror”, a malign presence “raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life”. Lewis attempts to interpret the “squatting horror” while observing that “one proceeds cautiously with such occult matters”. William James describes his own later experience of sudden hallucinatory “philosophic pessimism”, although attributed to a correspondent, in Varieties of Religious Experience.

Henry James was also interested in what he calls “the visitable past”; in 1870s London he cultivated Anne Benson Proctor, who was full of memories of “Keats and Shelley, Byron and Coleridge and [Walter] Landor”; another Byronic encounter was in Italy with Contessa Gamba, whose husband was the nephew of Byron’s mistress Teresa Guiccioli and who possessed unpublished letters. Recounting the story, Henry was told in turn about one Captain Silsbee, who was said to have lodged with the elderly Claire Clairmont and her niece with the aim of getting hold of letters of Byron and Shelley – the story inspired James’s The Aspern Papers.

The last part of the book is an appendix on the “later Jameses”. After such an extensive narrative of nearly 600 pages it is tempting to leave aside an extra essay of 40 pages (in smaller type, to boot!), but it is worth the time and is written in slightly more informal style – it is also here where the author notes his personal contact with some James descendants. William James had four surviving children, and the narrative includes details of their childhood experiences with their parents and “Uncle Henry”. One son, Harry (or Henry III), was a lawyer (and astute investor) who won a Pulitzer for his biography of Charles W. Eliot. A grandson of William James through another son was John Sumner Runnells James, who worked for CIA; this James was an addict and alcoholic, and his daughter recalls he and her step-mother destroying relics of William James’ expedition to Brazil with Louis Agassiz “amid much boozy merriment”. William James’s daughter Peggy, meanwhile, became a university confidant of Marianne Moore. Edward James, a son of Robertson James, offended Uncle Henry by publishing a criminal libel against the Prince of Wales. ...more

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This Earthly Globe by Andrea di Robilant

This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World
by Andrea di Robilant

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In the mid-sixteenth century, a sensational three-volume work published in Venice by Tommaso Giunti transformed Europe's understanding of its place in the wider world. Delle navigationi et viaggi, or "Journeys and Navigations", with cartography by Gi In the mid-sixteenth century, a sensational three-volume work published in Venice by Tommaso Giunti transformed Europe's understanding of its place in the wider world. Delle navigationi et viaggi, or "Journeys and Navigations", with cartography by Giacomo Gastaldi, brought together an array of travel accounts pertaining to Asia, Africa and the Americas, all translated into Italian and including classified material that had been "leaked" to the work's industrious but initially anonymous editor, a studious Venetian official named Giovambattista (or Giovanni Battista) Ramusio.

This Earthly Globe tells the story of Ramusio's life and political times, along with some long digressive narrative retellings taken from some of his sources. Most of the explorers and travellers he drew on were near-contemporaries; one such was Antonio Pigafetta, a survivor of the Magellan expedition. Pigafetta's manuscript Diary was initially of interest European monarchs and the pope more for describing a new route to the Spice Islands than for the extraordinary feat of the first circumnavigation of the world, and Charles V kept his copy under lock and key - early plans to publish it in Venice fell through due to a printer's avarice and the appearance rival volume derived from interview material. Other travellers whose writings made their way into Ramusio's project include Cadamostro, who under the patronage of the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator had explored West Africa a few decades previously; Hasan al-Wazzan, a captured Muslim diplomat from Fez who had been imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo; a delegation sent by the King of Portugal to make contact with Prester John's descendants in Ethiopia; and Ludovico di Varthema, an Italian who had visited Mecca (disguised as a Muslim), India and the Spice Islands. For China, however, Ramusio relied primarily on rather older source: Marco Polo, famous but long dismissed as a fabulist until Ramusio tracked down an early manuscript copy owned by the Ghisi family.

Ramusio and his father Paolo were intimates of the legendary Venetian publisher Aldus Manutis, who specialised in printing editions of Latin and Greek classical works, and the author speculates that a new edition of Strabo's Geography that Ramusio helped bring to fruition following Aldus's death was his "point of departure for a new geography that would take into account the extraordinary discoveries of his time". We are told more than is strictly necessary for the book’s main theme about how Ramusio helped to secure a manuscript of Pliny the Younger#s Letters for Aldus while on a diplomatic mission to France as an aide to Alvise Mocenigo ("whether they obtained them from the resident abbot or whether they secretly smuggled them out of the Abbaye de Saint-Victor with the help of some conniving friar is unclear"); similarly off the point, but interesting, are details of a visit that Aldus received Erasmus, and of how Ramusio's friend Pietro Bembo, at the time one of Aldus’s "star writers and editors", was prevented by the authorities from dedicating a novel to his lover Lucretia (Lucrezia) Borgia – Venice feared the reaction of her husband, the Duke of Ferrara.

Di Robinant’s style is informal, but the digressive travel accounts mean that Ramusio himself sometimes disappears from view – and in the case of Marco Polo, who had been dead more than two hundred years before Ramusio’s project was conceived, there’s a sense of a familiar journey being retrod. There is postscript in which the author visits Ramusio’s villa, which by happy coincidence had been purchased by a geographer named Francesco Vallerani. ...more

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Monty Python: The Case Against
by Robert Hewison

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As of 2025, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" is among the most popular songs played at funerals in the UK, and jokes from Monty Python's Life of Brian are embedded in the country's popular culture. Meanwhile, one of the film's creators, Micha As of 2025, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" is among the most popular songs played at funerals in the UK, and jokes from Monty Python's Life of Brian are embedded in the country's popular culture. Meanwhile, one of the film's creators, Michael Palin, is widely regarded as one of television's most genial and sympathetic presenters, meeting all sorts of people as he criss-crosses the globe making travel programmes. This book, by contrast, recalls a time when "Monty Python" was a byword for controversy and offence.

Monty Python: The Case Against is a short work, its double-column presentation broken up by reproductions of primary sources scattered through the pages: Hewison is an old friend of Palin since university days, and the publisher, Eyre Methuen, appears to have an extensive archive of legal materials and other correspondence relating to its responsibility for producing Python-related tie-in books. While Brian raised the spectre of Britain's then-archaic blasphemy laws, the books and records (the latter produced by Charisma Records) meant navigating issues relating to "copyright, libel and obscenity", and there were also corporate censorship battles: the higher echelons of the BBC were troubled by some of the material they were broadcasting (although they didn’t always understand it, on one occasion misinterpreting a severed arm in a sketch as a "big penis"), and the "mutilation" of their material in the US led to Pythons acting as litigants for a change. American law does not recognise "moral rights", but judges in New York were prepared to consider that cutting up their work might be financially damaging and that "to call the resulting programme 'Monty Python' might be a misdirection under the Lanham Act". The matter was settled, but the Pythons had "made a contribution to the new laws of the entertainment industry."

On the issue of copyright, there was an early skirmish when a firm of ukulele tutors objected to the reproduction of some sheet music in a spoof advertisement; more serious was when a copyright clearance for "Annie's Song" on an LP was disputed on the grounds both that the permission had not been for a parody and that the new lyrics were defamatory of John Denver. A curiosity of obscenity law was that whereas a jury trial might be persuaded to throw out a prosecution case, the law also allowed the police simply to seize materials and ask a magistrate to authorise their destruction. The Pythons did bend when proportionate, agreeing to remove a passing sexual reference from a printed monologue to prevent a publishing schedule being derailed.

The battle over Brian, of course, is the most celebrated controversy, and the title for Chapter 5 – "This Sick Enterprise" – is taken from a quote from the Nationwide Festival of Light, which overlapped with Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners Association. A few years previously, NVLA had successfully sued Gay News over a "blasphemous" poem, and the Pythons turned to the paper's barrister, John Mortimer, for advice. Given the litany of comdemnation from various clerics, it is interesting that Graham Chapman received a supportive hand-written letter from a canon of St George's, Windsor (from the acknowledgements identifiable as James Atherton Fisher), who based on his reading of the script and a tape of the dialogue took the view that, while the film may be offensive, it "is not meant to be blasphemous and that it is extracting the maximum comedy out of false religion… and out of all who use religion as a cover for their particular form of sin".

The publisher of the tie-in book was also nervous until the film was cleared for release by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) as an "AA" without cuts; however, the printer still refused to handle it after taking advice from John Smyth, the barrister who had previously brought the case against Gay News (more recently, it has come to light that Smyth was a notorious flagellomanic obsessed with beating boys, and may have been responsible for a fatality in Africa – the discovery of the scandal led to the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury over his knowledge of Smyth's predilections).

The final chapter deals with the furore around the release of the film, focusing on the USA and the UK but also surveying other countries. In Britain, local councils could censor what cinemas were allowed to show, creating a bizarrely haphazard approach: Hewison quotes James Ferman, the Secretary of the BBFC as describing West Yorkshire as "the most heavily-censored area in the English-speaking world – and that includes South Africa." The Pythons refused to allow a compromise where some cinemas offered to exhibit the film as an "X" certificate. Abroad, Norway worked around censorship by simply not giving certain lines Norwegian subtitles, which had minimal impact in a country where English is widely understood. As expected, this chapter also includes an account of the famous TV chat-show clash with Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood. ...more

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The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. III by Arthur Conan Doyle

The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. III: The Novels
by Arthur Conan Doyle

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Arthur Conan Doyle never revealed how he came to meet John Watson, although one theory noted by Leslie Klinger is that it was at the Phoenix Masonic Lodge, which Doyle joined in 1887. Whatever the circumstances, we know that Doyle became Watson’s col ...more

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The Popish Plot
by J.P. Kenyon

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The anti-Catholic "Popish plot" conspiracism that gripped England and Scotland in the late 1670s is synonymous with the name of Titus Oates. However, in this classic account of the affair J.P. Kenyon cautions that although "even today some Catholic a The anti-Catholic "Popish plot" conspiracism that gripped England and Scotland in the late 1670s is synonymous with the name of Titus Oates. However, in this classic account of the affair J.P. Kenyon cautions that although "even today some Catholic apologists refer to the Plot as 'Oates's Plot'… this is to flatter him. The King's mystifying foreign policy produced a general feeling of apprehension and instability, and the ebullient self-confidence of his Catholic courtiers and hangers-on accentuated it".

One of these courtiers was Edward Coleman (or Colman), secretary to Charles II's Catholic sister-in-law, Mary of Moderna. Coleman seems to have been a hapless figure, who as described by Kenyon "lived in an unreal world of his own". Coleman believed that the prospects of Catholics in England would be improved if Charles were less dependent on Parliament, and he entered into intrigues with the French court to bring this about. His scheming reflected "the delusion of all those outside the inner circle of power, that confessors and mistresses were significant political figures - more significant, indeed, than trusted and accredited ministers of state" – but although his efforts were ineffective he unwisely retained compromising correspondence that came to light in 1678, when he was accused by Oates to Charles and the Privy Council. Oates may have made a lucky guess, or he may have been given a tip-off by the Earl of Danby, the Lord Treasurer, who saw Colman as a bad influence.

What happened next set the conditions for a perfect storm of conspiracism: the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, to whom Oates had given a full deposition just before Colman's arrest. The case remains one of English history's great unsolved crimes - three men were convicted of the murder on the basis of false testimony, but later exonerated. Treason trials followed: Coleman was hanged, drawn and quartered towards the end of 1678; and "between June 20th and August 27th, 1679, and including those tried in London, fourteen Catholics were executed; one layman, two Franciscans, four seminary priests and seven Jesuits. To these must be added two reprieved for special reasons, and one who died in prison before execution."

Oates's supposed credibility was due to a period he had spent in France and Spain as "Fr Ambrose" – prior converting to Catholicism he had been a Baptist and an Anglican cleric, and he had just been dismissed from a position as a naval chaplain due to an allegation of homosexuality. He fared poorly as a novice at the English College at Valladolid and as a mature student St Omers, unable to master Latin, engaging in "bawdy and blasphemous conversation" and exhibiting homosexual tendencies, and at length he had been expelled back to London by the Provincial, Thomas Whitbread – who was to become one of Oates's victims. Having repudiated Catholicism (claiming that his conversion had been a pretence all along), Oates now claimed to have been the confidante of plotters at the highest levels. As Kenyon archly puts it: "Once it was accepted that such men would, half a dozen at a time, put their hands to letters detailing their treasonable plans, and consign their secrets to an ex-Anabaptist homosexual, then the rest followed."

Difficulties were glossed over: Oates's testimony relied on impossible and inconsistent dates; he was unable to recognise Coleman (he blamed poor candlelight); and his checkered past already included a prior perjury charge at Hastings in Sussex, where his father Samuel Oates had been given the living of All Saints Church by a London physician named Sir Richard Barker: "There he eagerly joined in his father's quarrel with a prominent local family, the Parkers, but he made the mistake of accusing young William Parker of sodomy and his father of treasonable words. The elder Parker's case went up to the Privy Council, which exonerated him, and the local magistrates dismissed the case against his son." It was to escape the perjury charge that he took the position as a naval chaplain.* Kenyon suggests Oates's father may have prompted him to accuse Sir William Goring and Sir John Gage, two Catholics Sussex landowners. His allegations were also in some cases far-fetched: his "psychotic mind", in Kenyon’s judgement, was most in evidence in his suggestion of conspiracies between Jesuits and Cromwellians.

Why were he and co-accusers such as Israel Tonge ("a crazy clergyman… a mental casualty of the Civil Wars") and William Bedloe taken so seriously? Kenyon explains:

a seventeenth-century treason trial was not an attempt to ascertain the truth or administer justice, except in a punitive sense. It was a morality play, staged as a demonstration of government power, an affirmation of kingly authority, and a warning to the unwary.

Judges could "coerce" juries, and it was generally understood that treason was so serious but difficult to prove that the accused were not to be allowed counsel or to sub poena witnesses, or even to be given a copy of the indictment against them – a way of proceeding that is "baffling and unpleasant" to modern readers. Bedloe, who when asked in court by one of his victims, Richard Langhorne, to clarify the extent of his allegations, "brazenly" replied that "Things may occur to my memory hereafter, which do not now" – the perennial boast of the false accuser.

Kenyon's narrative is based on close readings of primary sources, although he also engages with earlier scholarly treatments (in particular, that Sir John Pollock) and even gives dues to a book about Godfrey’s murder by "the American detective story writer John Dickson Carr". He also dips into group psychology, quoting Neil Smelser's Theory of Collective Behaviour and through him Anselm Strauss (cited only as "Strauss", and without any specific reference). This is particularly pertinent to reports of "night riders", mysterious horsemen supposedly either seen or heard across the country.

Although at times conversational in tone, parts of the text quite demanding. The trials held under Lord Chief Justice of England William Scroggs, with George Jeffreys as Recorder, are described in detail and at length, and it is not always clear that indviduals mentioned in passing in one place will become significant later on in the narrative, requiring a bit of back-and-forth.

* Footnote: The MP for Hastings, Sir Denny Ashburnham of Broomham, was asked about the matter in court. He was "pitiably embarrassed" that his knowledge about it and of Oates's history of dishonesty going back to childhood might undermine the Crown's case, and Scroggs "got rid of" him "quickly enough". Ashburnham was a distant cousin of the Ashburnhams of Ashburnham and also son-in-law of John Ashburnham "the Cavalier". ...more

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Sidney Bernstein: A biography
by Caroline Moorehead

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For many people in Britain of a certain age, the word "Granada" evokes not the sunshine and medieval romance of city in Spain, but rather the slate tiles and chimney pots of a modest Edwardian terrace under a damp and gloomy sky in the north of Engla ...more

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Chequers: The Prime Minister's Country House and Its History
by Norma Major

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In October 1917, the First World War had been dragging on for three years, the stagnation epitomised by the ongoing inability to dislodge German forces at Passchendaele. In response, Britain's prime minister, David Lloyd George, invited a party that In October 1917, the First World War had been dragging on for three years, the stagnation epitomised by the ongoing inability to dislodge German forces at Passchendaele. In response, Britain's prime minister, David Lloyd George, invited a party that included France's new premier Paul Painlevé and the South African general Jan Smuts for unofficial talks on how unity of command might transform the Allies' prospects. The venue for the meeting was Chequers, the Buckinghamshire country home of Arthur Lee MP, although Lee yielded the role of host – and his bedroom – to Lloyd George.

This was the first time that the sixteenth-century house had been put at the disposal of a prime minister, two months before the Chequers Estate Act designated it as the future official country residence of the serving prime minister from the time that Arthur Lee and his wife Ruth relinquished their interest. The Lees moved out in 1921, and since then it has been used by all Prime Ministers aside from Bonar Law, whose premiership was cut short by mortal illness after 209 days (even Liz Truss used the property for "farewell parties" towards the end of her 45-day reign in 2022). The author of this book, of course, is the wife of John Major, and it was written and published while he was in office. Many of the historical details have been culled from previously published works and memoirs, but her choice of material is judicious and shaped into a pleasing narrative overview. The book is heavily illustrated both with newly commissioned photographs by Mark Fiennes and older black-and-white images for comparison.

Lee, the son of a clergyman, was a former military man and diplomat, and while serving as military attaché at the British Embassy in Washington he had married Ruth Moore, the wealthy daughter of the New York banker John Godfrey Moore. The Lees took a lifetime tenancy of Chequers in 1909, and contracted Reginald Blomfield to undertake numerous restoration works, including the removal of Victorian pseudo-gothic accretions. The owner at this time was an aristocrat named Henry Astley, and after his death in an aviation accident in 1912 Ruth and her sister Faith took the opportunity to make an outright purchase from his widow May Kinder (a former comedy actress), which they then gifted to Arthur. However, being childless, Arthur and Ruth saw donation to the nation as the best way to preserve the legacy of their domestic vision. The 1917 Act covers all bases politically:

It is not possible to foresee or foretell from what classes or conditions of life the future wielders of power in this country will be drawn. Some may be as in the past men of wealth and famous descent; some may belong to the world of trade and business; others may spring from the ranks of the manual toilers. To none of these in the midst of their strenuous and responsible labours could the spirit and anodyne of Chequers do anything but good. In the city-bred man especially, the periodic contact with the most typical rural life would create and preserve a just sense of proportion between the claims of town and country. To the revolutionary statesman the antiquity and calm tenacity of Chequers and its annals might suggest some saving virtues in the continuity of English history and exercise a check upon too hasty upheavals, whilst even the most reactionary could scarcely be insensible to the spirit of human freedom which permeates the countryside of Hampden, Burke and Milton.

The last part of the book is on "political life at Chequers", treating each prime minister in turn and ending with personal anecdotes of how she and John received at different times various foreign leaders, such as the Clintons and Boris Yeltsin – famously, John Major took Yeltsin to the local pub, the Bernard Arms (now gone), which opened up especially for them after Yeltsin knocked on the door. Prime ministers resident at Chequers also sometimes patronised that other village establishment, the local church: a service attended by Harold Macmillan and Dwight Eisenhower saw "the largest congregation since Janet Attlee's wedding"; the vicar, the Rev. Cyril White, "had preached to every Prime Minister since Baldwin".

This account of Chequers in the twentieth century is preceded by a more general history and guided tour. The estate's distinctive name refers to the chequer-board (or, more precisely, a chequered tablecloth) on which the monarch's finances were tallied in the medieval period; in the twelfth century, the land on which the house would be built was transferred from the Knights Hospitallers to Elias Ostiarius, an official of the Court of the Exchequer who took the name "De Scaccario" or "de Chekers" to reflect his responsibility for setting up the table. The estate may simply reflect his name, although antiquarians theorised that it may have been the place where payments were made.
De Scaccario's great-daughter married a landowner named William de Alta Ripa, whose name in Norman French, "Haut Rive", evolved into Dawtrey and then Hawtrey – a surname that is commemorated at Chequers with the Hawtrey Room. The last male Hawtrey in residence was William Hawtrey, a founder of the Muscovy Company of London in the sixteenth century, and it was he who rebuilt the house as the Tudor residence it is today. This Hawtrey was also for a time the reluctant custodian of Lady Mary Grey, a granddaughter of Henry VIII's sister Mary and the younger sister of the ill-fated Lady Janes Grey. Mary had been packed off to Chequers following an "indiscreet" marriage, and her attic room remains known as the "Prison Room".

The house then passed down through various families through intermarriage – William Hawtrey's granddaughter Mary was contracted into a child marriage ("by special licence of the Archbishop of Canterbury") to Francis Wolley, the son of Elizabeth’s Latin secretary, and after their deaths, Chequers Court (as it was known then) passed to Mary's sister Bridget, wife of Sir Henry Croke. Henry's granddaughter, another Mary, married John Thurbarane, having been wooed with notes scribbled into the margins of a copy of Paradise Lost, and their daughter Joanna married first one Colonel Edmund Rivett and after his death Sir John Russell, grandson of Oliver Cromwell through his daughter Frances. It was a Russell descendant, Rosalind Frankland Russell, who married into the Astley family; thus the purchase from May Kinder in 1917 was the first time the house had ever been sold rather an inherited – but given so many female inheritors it seems appropriate that the seller was a woman selling to two other women.

Introducing the "guidebook" part of the book, Major writes that "Chequers can never be open to the public and I like to think Arthur Lee would have no objection to this book, which takes the reader behind the scenes of an intriguing part of our national heritage". As well as describing the architecture and décor, Major notes various artefacts: Cromwell memorabilia; a table used by Napoleon on St Helena; a ring once owned by Elizabeth I; and various paintings, including a work formely attributed to Rembrandt that Lee purchased from the Earl of Ashburnham's collection and a Rubens that according to legend had been "touched up" by Winston Churchill.

Of particular interest, though, are the items on the bookshelves in the Long Gallery, collected by different owners over the years:

The most treasured is an exquisitely illuminated fifteenth-century manuscript Missal from Bressanone in the Tyrol, immaculately preserved in its original velvet binding with gilt bosses and clasps. The other is a first edition of Albertus Magnus’ Paradise Animae, printed in, Cologne in 1483, seven years before Caxton first brought printing to England. There is a first printed edition (1503) of all but four of Euripides’ tragedies, added to the library by Sir George Russell, as well as sixteenth-century first editions of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Thermophoriazusae and a translation by Erasmus of Lucian of Samosata’s Saturnalia (published in Cologne), with the arms of Louis XIII on the binding. In a first illustrated edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1688) are Sergeant Thurbarne’s annotations; and a sixteenth-century volume of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs has Sir Robert Croke’s name inscribed on the fly-leaf.

Less fortunate is The Gollywogg Book, which recalls when Faith Moore brought a number of the grotesque dolls to the house for auction as a fundraising effort in the First World War: "The book remains in the second floor corridor, where Golliwogg lived, which is still known as the Golliwogg Corridor". Hopefully that is no longer the case.

Of course, every country house needs a touch of the uncanny, and Lloyd George thought his dog Chong could see a ghost: "Chong was particularly restless in the Long Gallery, where his master liked to rest in the afternoon. With his eyes fixed on one spot in the room, the dog used to set up a persistent barking." ...more

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The Making Of Dune
by Ed Naha

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A book about the making of a film that begins with a congratulatory foreword (styled as the "Introduction") by the producer's father is obviously going to be an "approved" account; the author may not have been under instruction to produce PR, but an A book about the making of a film that begins with a congratulatory foreword (styled as the "Introduction") by the producer's father is obviously going to be an "approved" account; the author may not have been under instruction to produce PR, but an embedded journalist always risks identification with the interests of his or her hosts at the expense of a critical perspective. Naha does recount various disasters and accidents that beset the production of the 1984 film of Dune at the "antiquated" Churubusco film studio in Mexico, but these are all challenges that are overcome with ingenuity and perseverance, and no dirty linen is washed in public – Dino De Laurentiis states that he "stayed in the background", although later sources suggest that not everyone remembers it that way. The last few chapters of the book are concerned with the film's post-production, but at the time of publication editing was still underway, meaning that there's no hint of how arguments over the final cut would sour the whole project and contribute to the film’s reputation as a critical failure.

Publication ahead of the film's release perhaps also explains why The Making of Dune has so little to say about David Lynch’s creative decisions as regards the script. We are shown lavish costumes, sets and spaceships, and there's an account of how one plot element (Paul's duel to the death Jamis) had to be jettisoned for reasons of pacing, but controversial changes and additions to the story are not referenced at all. Lynch had apparently scripted two sequels, but it is difficult to see how they would have worked given the massive divergence at the end of Dune, when Paul creates a rainstorm (welcomed by the Fremen despite the destruction of their entire way of life and economy). Why was Baron Harkonnen given not only a grotesque skin disease (criticised on the film’s release as a homophobic AIDS reference) but also a gratuitously mad doctor (played by Leonardo Cimino) who seems to have wondered in from an old Universal horror film? Sting carrying a shaved cat in a cage does get a mention and even a photograph, but no explanation. If Frank Herbert, who visited the set, had any misgivings, he either kept them to himself, or off the record. It seems he had a pragmatic attitude towards the book (reviewed here) that defines his reputation: "once it was published, I wasn't really aware of what was going on with the book, to be quite candid. I have this newspaperman's attitude about yesterday's news, you know? I've done that one, now let me do something else".

Instead, and despite Naha being himself a science-fiction creative, much of the interview material (Naha had access to most of the cast and crew) is concerned with the "nuts and bolts" of filmmaking and acting. The technical side of how various effects were achieved can be dull and even opaque in places, although Naha tries to liven things up with some humorous journalistic alliteration; in one typical backgrounder he writes that "Carlo Rambaldi is the man who designed and built the blood-thirsty finned fury in Orca, the Killer Whale, the barbaric bison in The White Buffalo and the colossal King Kong". The book's publishing schedule also means that there is no discussion of the soundtrack, which had still not been decided upon at the time.

The Making of Dune is heavily illustrated, albeit in black and white (which Lynch might perhaps have appreciated). One image, described as "a discarded design for a second stage guild navigator", is oddly reminiscent of John Hurt's makeup in Lynch's previous film, although he would have had to have called it The Aardvark Man. ...more