Culture

Mary Robinson: actress, poet, novelist, playwright, feminist and London bus. One could wait over a century for a biography of her and then three come along at once. Had London buses existed in Robinson’s lifetime, contemporary satirists would have leapt at the analogy, as it was widely believed that anyone who could afford the fare could have a ride. Robinson was best known not for her thespian or her literary talents, but for being a grande horizontale, most notably as the first mistress of the Prince of Wales (later George IV). Mary Robinson was born Mary Darby somewhere between 1756 and 1758 (the first of many characteristic obfuscations) and, at around the age of 15, married inadvisedly.

This is a distinguished addition to the select company of books that succeed in adding significantly to our understanding of Jean Monnet’s and Jacques Delors’ European project. Each author has adopted a different framework. Larry Siedentop, in Democracy in Europe, a self-conscious re-enactment of de Tocqueville, approached the EU’s problems of structure and democratic legitimacy through the prism of political philosophy. Hugo Young, in This Blessed Plot, an unrelievedly determinist account of what he saw as Britain’s and the Continent’s manifest common destiny, traced Britain’s uncertain march towards European federalism through the stories of individual participants.

With a little genealogical effort over three million people in this country can trace their ancestry back to a 15th- century hero called Sir Baldwin Fulford, and his luscious wife, Elizabeth Bozom, daughter of Sir John Bozom of Bozom-zeal. According to our old books of blazons Sir Baldwin was ‘a great soldier and a traveller of so undaunted resolution that for the honour and liberty of a royal lady he fought a combat with a Saracen (for bulk and bigness an unequal match) whom yet he vanquished’. In 1461 he was executed at Bristol, but Sir Baldwin’s spirit lives on, a little in all of us, and a great deal in his male heir representative of the 17th generation, the baggy landed gent and TV personality, Francis ‘Fucker’ Fulford.

The ordinariness of tragedy, its bread-and-butter nature at odds with Shakespearean grandeur or tabloid-style sensationalism, is the subject of Margaret Forster’s new novel. Is There Anything You Want? examines the lives of seven women in a small town in the north of England. Mrs Hibbert, Edwina, Dot, Chrissie, Ida, Rachel and Sarah are connected through work or illness to the cancer clinic of the local hospital.

The leprosarium of the Pacific islands in which I once worked was situated next to the Mental Wing, as the psychiatric hospital was known. The lepers derived considerable pleasure and hilarity from watching the antics of the lun- atics through the fence that separated them. This taught me an unedifying principle of human psychology, that the existence of people upon whom one can look down is a great solace in misfortune, no matter how grievous. Generally speaking, however, sufferers from leprosy have had no one upon whom to look down. They have been outcasts, cruelly separated from the rest of humanity and cut off even from their own families.

As a rule I decline to review books by old friends: it puts either one’s integrity or the friendship at risk. I make an exception of Father Joe because I first read it six months ago, prior to its publication in New York and, while not as overwhelmed as many American reviewers — Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times Book Review placed it in ‘the first tier of spiritual memoirs ever written’ — I did find it an exceptional book that merits its success in the United States. Tony Hendra is the son of an English stained-glass artist from a working-class background, and a mother of Irish — though she liked to pretend it was Scottish — extraction. He was raised as a Catholic and at the age of 14 was almost seduced by a married woman in the parish.