Dorset

Today

Charles Moore

The conservatism of Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard, who died last week, never wrote a memoir, but he did sort of speak one. Just over ten years ago, he told me that he and his new wife, Sabrina Guinness, had become tenants of an old rectory in Dorset. I asked him if he would therefore speak as guest of honour at the AGM of the Rectory Society, a fan club for existing and former clergy houses which I invented in 2005. The AGM always takes place in a central London church, and in 2015, the year I invited Tom, it was held in the Queen’s Chapel beside St James’s Palace. Beyond expressing a tepid wish that

Thursday

Claudia FitzHerbert

No one could match Tess, to Thomas Hardy’s dismay

In her disillusioned later years Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma, bitterly reflected: ‘He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all.’ In Hardy Women, Paula Byrne sets out to recover the stories of the women in his life ‘who did not have a voice and who were often deliberately omitted from Hardy’s self-ghosted autobiography’, in order to reveal that ‘the magnificent fictional women he invented would not have been possible without the hardship and hardiness of the real ones who shaped his passions and his imagination’. She has not come up with anything that radically changes what we already know of Hardy’s background and what he