Philippa Stockley

In what was intended as the opening line of a 1951 catalogue essay to an exhibition by the painter Leonor Fini, Jean Cocteau wrote: ‘There is always, at the margin of work by men, that luminous and capricious shadow of work by women.’ Not surprisingly, Fini excised it. In what was intended as the opening line of a 1951 catalogue essay to an exhibition by the painter Leonor Fini, Jean Cocteau wrote: ‘There is always, at the margin of work by men, that luminous and capricious shadow of work by women.’ Not surprisingly, Fini excised it. But it was an attitude that would plague her, and other female artists in Paris’s Surrealist milieu, for the rest of her life.

The ability to manufacture discontent from whatever materials are to hand is one of the most consistent characteristics of human nature. In Hubbub, pithy historian Emily Cockayne roams the seamy, stinky and squelchy side of English life: ‘The experiences presented here are unashamedly skewed towards the negative . . . . I am deliberately not presenting a rounded view of life — I am simply presenting the worst parts of it.’ For those with a cheerful predilection towards grime, gunge and disease, the torrent that follows is riveting. Within chapters headed Ugly, Itchy, Mouldy, Noisy, Grotty, Busy, Dirty and Gloomy, Cockayne rolls like a pig in a delicious vat of mud.

‘A ship is sooner rigged by far, than a gentleman made ready,’ scoffed Thomas Tomkis in 1607, about how long men took to dress. But in the 17th century wasting time this way was no male preserve. ‘Women,’ wrote Joseph Swetnam, ‘are the most part of the fore-noone painting themselves and frizzling their haires and prying in their glasse, like Apes.’ In her new book, Fashion and Fiction, Courtauld professor Aileen Ribeiro shows, by interpreting a gallery of arresting portraits backed up by contemporary literature, that clothes were a consuming, costly passion — a social index, suitor’s shorthand and poet’s primer.