James I

To our jaded century, ‘fairy’ carries connotations ranging from the sentimental to the sickly. It conjures childishness, foolishness, insipidity and softness – Tinker Bell, the Tooth Fairy, the Cottingley photographs that fooled Arthur Conan Doyle, cakes, twinkling lights and a certain brand of soap. Francis Young feels that the word should also be applied to countless other traditions of supernatural entities from earliest times on – that fairy stories help us fathom being human. Young has written or worked on many books about religion and folklore, and this is his third specifically on fairies. Suffolk Fairylore (2018) and Twilight of the Godlings (2023) explored British ‘encounters’; now he expands across

The Duke of Buckingham, wrote Alexandre Dumas, lived ‘one of those fabulous existences which survive… to astonish posterity’. In the summer of 1614, a young man from a modest gentry family was invited to a hunting party in Northamptonshire to meet a very special guest. George Villiers was affable, not terribly bright and superlatively beautiful. His mother Mary, a practical and ambitious woman, knew what his looks could do for the family, and she aimed high. The mark was King James I, a monarch who openly loved men. The king had lavished his then favourite, Robert Carr, with titles, wealth and great offices, but the finest pair of legs in

The Dowager Countess of Deloraine, who was governess to the children of George II at Hampton Court and other royal homes, was a notorious bore – so much so that her ‘every word’ made one ‘sick’, according to the courtier Lord Hervey. When she naively asked him why everyone was avoiding her, he replied with exquisite irony that ‘envy kept the women at a distance, despair the men’. This kind of witty, skittish anecdote is scattered throughout Gareth Russell’s scintillating hybrid of a book, which is partly a biography of a place and partly something stranger: an episodic history of England from Tudor times to the present, illustrated by lightning