Yvonne M Ward shows how a royal reputation was tidied up for posterity - no more sex drive and rude comments about foreigners.

I'm not sure I'm entirely on board with the idea that Lord Esher and AC Benson, yes, one of those Bensons (you could not make them up) were so diametrically opposed - Morris Kaplan in Sodom on the Thames has a substantial ( Read more... )

Unfortunately, Germaine Greer's review of Caitlin Moran's new book How To Be A Woman is sequestered behind The Times paywall (chiz! chiz! this is the second time this week that this has thwarted me - apparently Helen King had a letter there exploding the Queen Victorian, cannabis and period pains historimyth, which I have not been able to access).

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The Royal Collection includes a piece of Queen Victoria's wedding-cake. (According to this image, in one of those dinky little boxes people use to send out crumbs of cake to absent friends and relatives.) The archivist in me thinks 'Woh! conservation nightmare!'

In this week's 'Wisdom's Folly' Julian Baggini discusses a famous line from Yeats' 'Second Coming' and gets it wrong. Horrors. Is nothing sacred?

And the discovery of a letter from Queen Victoria indicating her distraught state on the death of John Brown, has 'reignited speculation... that their relationship was more than platonic'. However
While ( Read more... )