Book Reviews

The writer William Mayne has said, ‘I don’t know why there are supposed to be only two sexes. I can think of at least eight, even before you get to women.’ Mary Wollstonecraft, though no wit, would have been pleased with this. She saw herself as neither male nor female but ‘a new genus’, one who must always ‘follow her own track’, and be ‘tender’ but intransigent. She could not see herself as of the same species as other girls who seemed to live for marriage — any marriage — to escape the shame of poverty and spinsterhood. She herself had been the child of a terrible marriage; her father

This book illuminates Brown and his circle: they appear paranoid and anyone who challenges them has to be done in. Robert Peston acknowledges some of this, and is occasionally critical of Brown but more often laudatory. It is typical of the Brown camp to co-operate on the book and then dismiss its contents as tittle-tattle. The purported betrayal of Brown by Blair over the leadership is familiar, but the evidence weak. Much of the ‘proof’ is based on unattributed or second-hand comments. Blair is a master of ambiguity and, as Peston points out, Brown’s wishes could sometimes be father to the thought and his reports of conversations with Blair are

The biographers, like eager heirs round a deathbed, were amassing by Robert Louis Stevenson’s side while he was still breathing. The story, they could tell, was going to be just too good. The age loved a youthful demise, and anyone could see that Stevenson was not going to make old bones. They were quite right, and the myth of Stevenson has gone on inspiring countless biographers ever since. It’s very surprising that Claire Harman’s publishers claim that ‘no biography has yet done justice’ to Stevenson. This ground has been gone over so many times, and it is a bold biographer who thinks that a small change in circumstances — in

Mary Robinson: actress, poet, novelist, playwright, feminist and London bus. One could wait over a century for a biography of her and then three come along at once. Had London buses existed in Robinson’s lifetime, contemporary satirists would have leapt at the analogy, as it was widely believed that anyone who could afford the fare could have a ride. Robinson was best known not for her thespian or her literary talents, but for being a grande horizontale, most notably as the first mistress of the Prince of Wales (later George IV). Mary Robinson was born Mary Darby somewhere between 1756 and 1758 (the first of many characteristic obfuscations) and, at

This is a distinguished addition to the select company of books that succeed in adding significantly to our understanding of Jean Monnet’s and Jacques Delors’ European project. Each author has adopted a different framework. Larry Siedentop, in Democracy in Europe, a self-conscious re-enactment of de Tocqueville, approached the EU’s problems of structure and democratic legitimacy through the prism of political philosophy. Hugo Young, in This Blessed Plot, an unrelievedly determinist account of what he saw as Britain’s and the Continent’s manifest common destiny, traced Britain’s uncertain march towards European federalism through the stories of individual participants. Christopher Booker and Richard North’s tour de force, The Great Deception, an indispensable counterpoint

With a little genealogical effort over three million people in this country can trace their ancestry back to a 15th- century hero called Sir Baldwin Fulford, and his luscious wife, Elizabeth Bozom, daughter of Sir John Bozom of Bozom-zeal. According to our old books of blazons Sir Baldwin was ‘a great soldier and a traveller of so undaunted resolution that for the honour and liberty of a royal lady he fought a combat with a Saracen (for bulk and bigness an unequal match) whom yet he vanquished’. In 1461 he was executed at Bristol, but Sir Baldwin’s spirit lives on, a little in all of us, and a great deal

The ordinariness of tragedy, its bread-and-butter nature at odds with Shakespearean grandeur or tabloid-style sensationalism, is the subject of Margaret Forster’s new novel. Is There Anything You Want? examines the lives of seven women in a small town in the north of England. Mrs Hibbert, Edwina, Dot, Chrissie, Ida, Rachel and Sarah are connected through work or illness to the cancer clinic of the local hospital. They share further connections, so that their lives overlap outside the hospital confines: Mrs Hibbert is Chrissie’s aunt by marriage; Edwina’s daughter is Mrs Hibbert’s garden help — just as Ida’s husband was Mrs Hibbert’s mother’s garden boy; Sarah is Dot’s daughter; Ida and

The leprosarium of the Pacific islands in which I once worked was situated next to the Mental Wing, as the psychiatric hospital was known. The lepers derived considerable pleasure and hilarity from watching the antics of the lun- atics through the fence that separated them. This taught me an unedifying principle of human psychology, that the existence of people upon whom one can look down is a great solace in misfortune, no matter how grievous. Generally speaking, however, sufferers from leprosy have had no one upon whom to look down. They have been outcasts, cruelly separated from the rest of humanity and cut off even from their own families. Their

As a rule I decline to review books by old friends: it puts either one’s integrity or the friendship at risk. I make an exception of Father Joe because I first read it six months ago, prior to its publication in New York and, while not as overwhelmed as many American reviewers — Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times Book Review placed it in ‘the first tier of spiritual memoirs ever written’ — I did find it an exceptional book that merits its success in the United States. Tony Hendra is the son of an English stained-glass artist from a working-class background, and a mother of Irish — though