Frances Wilson

What was it like, asks Jay Nordlinger, to have Mao as your father, or Pol Pot, or Papa Doc? The answer is that while all happy families are alike, the children of monsters are unhappy in their own way. Some dictatorial offspring are fairly normal while others are psychos. Nicu Ceausescu, son of the rulers

‘Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr Worthing,’ pleads Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.’ Weatherland would make Gwendolen very nervous indeed. Our observations of the sky, Alexandra

Well, you can’t say he wasn’t warned. Swimming pools, Nancy Astor told her son, Bill, were ‘disgustin’. I don’t trust people in pools.’ If he wanted to swim he should take a dip in the River Thames, which flowed through the grounds. But when his horse won the Oaks, Bill Astor built his long-desired pool,

We know a great deal about Samuel Johnson and virtually nothing about his Jamaican servant, Francis Barber. The few facts of which we can be certain are these: born into slavery, Barber was aged about seven when his owner, Colonel Richard Bathhurst — who may, Michael Bundock suggests here, have been his father — brought

Rex Whistler — this book’s ‘bright young thing’ — was an artist of the 1920s and 1930s, and Edith Olivier, the ‘bluestocking’, was a novelist. They both deserve to be more famous than they are, and Anna Thomasson’s absorbing joint biography will doubtless make them so. They met through Stephen Tennant in 1924, when Olivier

This is the tale of Muriel Lester, once famous pacifist and social reformer, and Nellie Dowell, her invisible friend. Nellie Dowell is invisible in the sense that Claire Tomalin described Nelly Ternan in The Invisible Woman. While Ternan, the mistress of Charles Dickens, simply ‘vanished into thin air’, Nellie Dowell, who may or may not