In 1980, the Clarendon Press published the first volume of a projected multi-volume biography of the Duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s foreign minister who is often blamed for France’s catastrophic defeats in the Seven Years’ War, and therefore for a major share of the governmental failures of the Ancien Régime which precipitated the FrenchContinue reading “How not to write a biography – a cautionary tale”
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Revisiting Anglican Classics: Jane Austen at 250
250 years ago a baby girl was born in a country rectory in southern England. She was the seventh child for her parents George and Cassandra within ten years. She was baptised privately in her father’s church within a day – in those times of high infant mortality and dread of dying unbaptised, aContinue reading “Revisiting Anglican Classics: Jane Austen at 250”
Revisiting Anglican Classics 10: Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond
Rose Macaulay’s Towers of Trebizond (1956) is generally regarded as her masterpiece, and almost certainly it is the most commonly read of her novels today. It is also a sort of running tribute to Anglo-Catholicism, saturated with asides, often hilarious, about Anglo-Catholics and their peculiar habits and attitudes, and at the same time quietly appreciativeContinue reading “Revisiting Anglican Classics 10: Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond”
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