Juliet Nicolson is an author and contributing editor to Harper’s Bazaar magazine. The Book of Revelations, Women and their Secrets from the 1950s to the Present Day (Chatto & Windus) will be published on 2nd October 2025
The 55-year-old ’flu-ridden John Charles Wallop, 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, his feet in a basin of warm water, shivered in the dock with fever but also with fear. Would the jury, assembled in 1823 in London’s jam-packed Freemason’s Hall at the end of an unpredecentally sensational two-week trial, find him eccentric, delusional, simple-minded or, instead,
Contrary to popular myth, the exuberant flame of life in the English country house was not extinguished by tears at the end of the Great War. And in his deliciously jaunty and wonderfully knowledgeable book, Adrian Tinniswood, social historian and country house authority, also upturns the story that huge numbers of Britain’s loveliest houses disappeared
How could you possibly justify a whole book about buttons? How could the mention of a humble wooden toggle, a diamond clasp, a ‘blue side buckle’ inspire such an unusual and irresistibly delightful account of more than a century’s worth of women’s lives? You might wonder. But as Lynn Knight sorts her way through her
Although the young women of the 1950s hovered on the cusp of change, many did not know it. Valerie Gisborn was the exuberant 15-year-old daughter of ‘a sharp-tempered, anti-social’ mother riddled with ‘neurotic restrictiveness’. But Valerie had fallen in love. She had met Brian in 1949 at the local ballroom in Leicester, her sole permissible
