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For God’s sake: the things they do to you
Biographer Monique Goodliffe reviews the novel “Women Talking” by Miriam Toews in an important guest blog on fundamentalism and the treatment of women. In a remote part of Bolivia, many girls and women woke up in the morning feeling drowsy and in pain, their bodies...
Making musical clocks in Blackfriars
A Protestant-made timepiece was chosen by historian Neil MacGregor to be one of twenty British Museum objects which best illustrate Shakespeare’s life and the background for his plays. The rare musical clock, created by highly-skilled Flemish Protestant refugee...
Shut out from a mystery: Guest Blog reviewing “Educated” by Tara Westover
Biographer Monique Goodliffe has contributed a review of Tara Westover’s stunning memoir “Educated”:
When I was little, I lived at an Anglican mission in the high veld in South Africa. My parents, both doctors, worked at the hospital there. We …
Cancer ward
I’ve been sitting in a cancer ward at the Royal Marsden Hospital, desperately relying on a Tudor detective novel to distract me. Nurses are putting cancer drugs into my child and it’s almost impossible to bear. One of them catches me glaring at her. “Everything OK?”...
Neat freaks find my CD-Rom
I just had the declutterers in. It’s sheer extravagance, but when you’ve still got the debris from your father’s estate to weed out, ten years after his death, probably justified. Maybe in 2008 I believed I might still keep him – deny death - by holding on to every...
Half-Hanged Mary and The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood dedicated her novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” to Mary Webster – “Half-Hanged Mary”. Webster was hanged from a tree for witchcraft in 17th century Puritan New England, yet – remarkably – survived overnight, was cut down, and subsequently lived on for...
Versailles Series III: The Sun King and the Huguenots
“Versailles” is a Franco-Canadian TV series: an expensively-made costume drama about the court of Louis XIV, famous for its extravagance, fashion and fireworks - both literal and metaphorical. Apparently it was shot in English rather than French to lure a global...
An Englishman’s history of France
The writer, broadcaster and popular historian John Julius Norwich died on 1 June 2018, aged 88, just after publishing “France: A History from Gaul to de Gaulle”. Poignantly, the author says in the preface: “I know I have said it before, but this is almost certainly...
Cardinal Richelieu and the Devils of Loudun
I had to buy a second-hand copy of Aldous Huxley’s “The Devils of Loudon” from Amazon Marketplace, having searched unsuccessfully in independent bookshops for a current edition. “Do people no longer read it?” I wondered. When the vintage Penguin paperback arrived...
Corrag, The Highland Witch
Susan Fletcher’s novel “Witch Light” is set in 1692, a handful of years after my Huguenot ancestors fled France and landed in England – hopeful of a warm welcome, since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had ousted James II (a king too prone to Catholicism) and installed...
Dreams, nightmares and the possibility of flight
The stand-off between pagan superstition, Christian rationalism and science is a central theme in Sarah Perry’s second novel The Essex Serpent. Perry was brought up a Strict Baptist; Strict Baptists, like monks, live in the world but not of it. The mortal world is...
The fear that someone, somewhere may be happy
I read Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction with a sense of recognition. Here were my people, all down in black and white. Strict Baptists – the sect I was brought up in – must be the rump, the tiny remainder, …
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