Hugh Cecil 
The art of deception
Max Beerbohm, dandy, cartoonist and penetrating drama critic, was par excellence the observer of the glittering English period that stretched from the 1890s to the death of Edward VII, poking… Read more
A soul in agony
In this compelling book, Matthew Hollis analyses how Edward Thomas, for years a frustrated literary critic and prose writer on rural themes, became all at once, at the age of… Read more
Beasts in battle
‘Never such innocence again’ wrote Philip Larkin of an unquestioning British people on the eve of the first world war, and much has been made, not unreasonably, of the trusting… Read more
From void to void, with time to kill
Just as the slaughter in the trenches of Flanders and northern France gave birth to the tragic verses of Wilfred Owen, so the experience of bombing and being bombed between… Read more
Anything for a laugh
A hundred years ago, when Britannia still ruled the waves, the Royal Navy fell victim to a humiliating hoax, reports of which kept the public amused for a few wintry… Read more
Living the pagan idyll
For years an intimate friend of my mother Rachel Cecil, Frances Partridge inhabits my memory from early childhood. Before she reached 50, her dark, delicate skin was already seamed with… Read more
In a class of his own
‘Voltaire and the Sun King rolled into one’ is how Elizabeth Longford has described her Oxford tutor Maurice Bowra. As Fellow and then Warden of Wadham College from 1922 to… Read more
Memoirs of the Great War
Survivors of a Kind, by Brian Bond In Survivors of a Kind, Brian Bond, one of our most distinguished modern military historians, has written an absorbing and affectionate study of… Read more
Not forgetting the horses’ indigestion
The appearance of this volume is an important publishing event. It is the first book in ten years from one of the outstanding historians of our age. Its brevity and… Read more
Singing in the mud
This is a courageous and original book. Its editor, Vivien Noakes, is resisting, though not alone (Martin Stephen, Anne Powell, Dominic Hibberd and John Onions could also be cited), a… Read more
Public servant, private saint
Leonard Woolf had a passion for animals, not unconnected with an appetite for control. Dogs (with the occasional mongoose or monkey) were his companions to the end of his life.… Read more
The sunlight on the garden parties
Listing page content here As a social and economic phase of English life the ‘Edwardian age’ had a longer span than the ten years of Edward VII’s reign. It began,… Read more
Will Haig end up as a cuddly toy?
If you ask most people in Britain today for their views on the first world war, they tell you that it was a futile holocaust in which our nation’s brave… Read more
A season in Hell
This sensitive, outspoken diary begins during the dark last days of the ‘dead little, red little army’, the British Expeditionary Force which bolstered the French left flank in Flanders from… Read more
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