by Huguenot Jo | Apr 20, 2019 | Book review
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...
by Huguenot Jo | Mar 23, 2019 | Book review, Catholicism, Puritanism, The Huguenots
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 …
by Huguenot Jo | Jul 15, 2018 | Book review, Film/Broadcast review, Puritanism, The Outcast Woman
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...
by Huguenot Jo | Jun 24, 2018 | Book review, Catholicism, 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...
by Huguenot Jo | Jun 17, 2018 | Book review
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 …
by Huguenot Jo | Jun 3, 2018 | Book review, The Outcast Woman
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...
