I'm in two minds about this book. It did give me some interesting information to flesh out my rather shaky image of Princess Beatrice and made me understand why she edited her mother's journals - something that had previously made me vilify her somewhat - and completed my increased research into ...
At fifty-seven she had been, in her own words, ‘a woman, no longer young’ for five years, and was happy to lean on this prettiest of props. She was, one observer noted, ‘very large, ruddy and fat’,2 with a hearty appetite and robust constitution, but fretted continually about her health. Beatrice...
With the voice of a sea creature, throaty and raucous, he was virtually unintelligible, Seneca claimed; Pliny the Elder counted him among the hundred most scholarly authors of the day. Disgraced by ‘a horrible habit under the stress of anger of slobbering at the mouth and running at the nose, a s...
