Hermione Eyre

Are books becoming an adjunct to TV? Both of these are good reads, but both feel influenced by — and yearning for — television. Medieval Bodies could be the script for a landmark BBC Four series, while the author of How to Behave Badly in Renaissance Britain came to prominence as farthingale consultant on programmes

Stephen Fry has had a go at the Greek myths, in a competitively priced hardback, just in time for Christmas. And he has done it jolly well, actually, so lower that collective eyebrow, please, all of you purists who think entertainers ought to stay away from the classics, and remember that as one of our

There has never previously, I believe, been a novel about Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, one of the 17th century’s foremost female authors, philosophers and eccentrics. But there have been several near misses. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando tips its cap to her: Orlando, just like Cavendish, is a feverishly imaginative, androgynous aristocrat afflicted by the ‘honourable

The Marshalsea was the best and worst place for a debtor to be imprisoned. From 1438 until its closure in 1842, there was dishonour in its name, contagion in its air and cruelty in its very premise: once detained, debtors could take no action to improve their lot. Instead, imprisonment was meant to serve to

This biography of the craven Romantic and self-confessed ‘Pope of Opium’ concludes with the ominous words: ‘We are all De Quinceyan now.’ His life was shambolic but his legacy is strong. Many spores from his fevered mind have lodged in modern popular culture: his narcotic excursions inspired Baudelaire and Burroughs, his sensitivity to place influenced

This is not only an authorised but a commissioned biography. Felix Dennis, the tiny, depraved, manipulative media mogul, was hardly going to let a free hand choose the adjectives that defined him. The author recalls his initial fright at being contacted: “Of course I’d be delighted to speak to Felix,” I said, my voice an

They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often inconceivable to the modern reader. Seneca, however, that rich, compromised sophisticate of the first century AD, is instantly kin, his voice weary with consumerism, his problems definitively first-world. ‘Being poor is not having too little,’

The long, happy and unlikely marriage of the great Conservative leader Disraeli and his wife Mary Anne, 12 years his senior, is analysed thoughtfully in Daisy Hay’s new book. Reading between the lines, it is possible to see the Disraelis as a Victorian power couple not unlike the Underwoods in Netflix’s remade House of Cards