This is an exceptional biography at so many levels. It recovers not so much a person as a period.Emma, Lady Hamilton, was a clever but perhaps not always intelligent person of great beauty and charm, and acting skills, who rose from extreme poverty to become the wife of an ambassador and the mist...
In the meantime, we must see London together.’ She was up in her gown and making Celia tea again. Celia’s head was messy with staying up late and listening to Miss Webb and Mr Sparks argue about politics, debating with Mr Janus whether wars did or did not improve art. After the café, they had com...
Even more so if you actually had been a VAD. Almost ten years on and it was all about nostalgia, girls who were eighteen, nineteen, only children during the war, dressed up as nurses. Ellen, one of the girls in the office, had spotted an advertisement for a party near Oxford Street – and when Cel...
She struggled not to cry and could eat nothing. According to the Comte de Beausset, the palace prefect who was attending them, she looked the “image of sadness and despair.” Napoleon’s only words while they dined were “What time is it?” Before the comte had a chance to reply, the emperor rose fro...
We can't always will or demand a replacement. Often we receive a friend when we are least expecting one. When Rachel and I were talking about all the lost things we missed, she remembered losing her favorite stuffed animal when she was three. After all these years, she sti...