Sarah Bradford

Lorenzo de’ Medici was proverbially ugly. Machiavelli, describing an encounter with a particularly hideous prostitute, compared her looks to his. He was tall, well-made and physically imposing but contemporaries dubbed his features ‘homely’, his face was bony and irregular with a long crooked nose, a jutting pugilistic jaw and dark piercing eyes. In compensation, ‘his intellect and taste’ were outstanding. He wrote poetry in the Tuscan language, read Plato and other classical authors, whom he discussed with his circle of poets and philosophers, discovered the young Michelangelo and patronised Botticelli.

There is something irresistible about forgers, cocking a snook as they do at their target establishments — in this case the formidable intellectual and historical talents of Baroque (hardly Renaissance as the title claims) Rome, a circle which included the towering figure of the polymath Athanasius Kircher. What makes this case even more piquant is that the forger was a 19-year-old Tuscan nobleman, Curzio Inghirami, and the forged manuscripts posing as important Etruscan relics were wrapped in his 13-year-old sister’s hair.

Within just a week of the tragic assassination in Dallas, the widowed Jackie Kennedy summoned the presidential chronicler Theodore H. White to a midnight conference at the family compound on the stormy Cape Cod shore. For four hours her whispery voice mesmerised him as she set out her vision of the Kennedy White House as Camelot, and, against his better judgment, White went along with it. Within years, as Jackie’s own image as Camelot’s widowed queen was defaced by her ‘gold-digging marriage’ to Onassis, and more and more scandal from the Kennedy years bubbled to the surface, the image of Camelot became a target for Kennedy critics, notably Seymour Hersh in The Dark Side of Camelot.

From Apicius to the Ivy: Roy Strong, the possessor of 800 cookbooks, has written a fascinating and scholarly study of social eating from Greece to the 21st century, a single-volume synthesis of the most significant work published in various countries and various languages over the last two decades, polished with style, bibliographical knowledge and an ability to spin a subject. His first book of this genre, which I remember reviewing for The Spectator, was Art and Power, a study of Renaissance festivals. This should perhaps be subtitled 'Power Dining' since its main theme is eating, food and etiquette as a demonstration of political and social power, the principal objective through the centuries being social exclusion not communal enjoyment.