Harry Mount

“Mad, bad and dangerous to know.” That’s the line Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828) is known for — her brilliant, pithy verdict on her lover Lord Byron. Her other great claim to fame — her marriage to Viscount Melbourne, twice prime minister — was marginal from a historical point of view: she died, aged only forty-two, her health shattered by drink and laudanum, before Melbourne became PM; before he became Lord Melbourne, in fact — he succeeded to the title after her death. But, still, as Lady Antonia Fraser reveals in her gripping biography, Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit, she was a remarkable woman, possessed of exceptional charm, as was Byron.

If a Martian landed on Earth and wanted a quick summary of the state of modern American life, I would point him toward the works of Curtis Sittenfeld. Sittenfeld (born 1975 in Ohio) is a novelist. Like all the great ones, her perceptions are more accurate about real life than most nonfiction writers’ could claim. In Prep (2005), she skewered American class in the story of a Massachusetts boarding school; Sittenfeld herself went to private school at Groton. In Rodham (2020), a novel about Hillary Clinton, she nailed today’s politics. And, in her best book to date, American Wife (2008), a thinly disguised novel about George and Laura Bush, she filleted the American approach to inherited money, and the swaggering confidence it produces.

Was the Queen Mother ever really funny? She was clearly extremely good company: an attentive listener, full of enthusiasm and affection, right up until her death, aged 101, in 2002. She was also the ideal queen for an unconfident George VI, undermined by his stutter and caught unawares by his accession to the throne, thanks to the abdication of his appallingly selfish brother, Edward VIII. The only time I ever saw the Queen Mother — when she was eighty, at her Clarence House home — I was only eight, but I remember her clearly. A tiny figure, she beamed away, spreading goodwill among strangers when so many people that age have lost mobility, let alone the ability to cheer up other people. Grumpy George V had thought much the same of her charm nearly sixty years earlier.

The cover blurb, from “Lady Anne Glenconner” on this huge book proclaims: “Brilliant. Tina Brown has inside knowledge and writes so well.” The credit for the author of the 2019 bestseller, Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown should in fact be “Lady Glenconner”. You might not think it matters much these days that, over and over again, Tina Brown gets the titles wrong in this book. But this is supposedly the ultimate insider’s look at the royal family over the last forty years or so. And titles are at the heart of the Firm — think of the agony of Prince Harry and Prince Andrew at no longer being able to use their HRH titles and having to give up their honorary military roles.

In December 1921, a twenty-two-year-old Ernest Hemingway, then the European correspondent for the Toronto Star, came across the oddest group of immigrants in history — the White Russians who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution. “Paris is full of Russians,” Hemingway told his readers. “They are drifting along in Paris in a childish sort of hopefulness that things will somehow be all right, which is quite charming when you first encounter it and rather maddening after a few months. No one knows just how they live, except by selling off jewels and gold ornaments and family heirlooms that they brought with them to France.” Hemingway neatly summarized the meat of this gripping latest book by Helen Rappaport, the author of The Romanov Sisters and Caught in the Revolution.