by Huguenot Jo | Apr 26, 2020 | Book review, Film/Broadcast review
It was comforting to slide back into the familiar mind of Thomas Cromwell as imagined by Hilary Mantel. If you haven’t tackled Mantel’s Tudor trilogy, it’s a very apt project for the lockdown – three enormous tomes, all of them …
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 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 …
