Philippa Gregory on...

The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 I have just re-read this and constantly admired the economy of Fitzgerald. He can write poignant paragraphs that come out of almost nothing, as a reader you can hardly tell what he is doing, but you emerge from the novel feeling emotionally wrung. It’s the story of the most glamorous couple on the French Riviera, and slowly you understand that much of their beauty is a façade, and that even their passion is something that will pass.

Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber

I had a gap in my reading this summer and asked my friend, a Profesor of Literature to suggest something I had never read. I specified that it had to have lovely clothes in it (I was feeling frivolous). She suggested Edna Ferber and so I discovered this great American writer whose work had, until now, entirely passed me by. Marooned in English literature I simply had not heard of her, and discovered to my shame that she is the author of Show Boat  a play that I love. 

Butcher and Bolt by David Loyn

I am an historian by absolute instinct and I have been thinking about Afghanistan and so read Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and then this  pacey history of European intervention in what the Victorians called the North west Frontier – meaning Afghanistan, north-west of India. Loyn tells some extraordinary stories of heroism and folly as the British pursued their imperial mission into Afghanistan and failed in some of the most brutal incidents.

History Play by Rodney Bolt

I am beginning to think that I am addicted to this book. I have read and re-read it. I love its shameless exploitation of history, its utter determination to tell its own viewpoint, I love its sense of magic and the way that it brings Shakespeare’s plays into the life of Europe at the time, and the way that Bolt pursues an extraordinary theory about the authorship with such energy.

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