This is my review of The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination by Fiona MacCarthy.

Burne-Jones sought lifelong escapism into the world of mythical romance as a reaction to the ugliness of a childhood in industrial Birmingham. When his deep friendship with William Morris was finally fractured by the latter's involvement with active socialism, Burne Jones wrote of his desire to take refuge in the artistic work which he could control.

He had some strokes of luck: Rossetti found commissions for him to design stained glass – often for the very wealthy industrialists responsible for the world he hated; Ruskin paid for a couple of trips to Italy where he discovered at that time little-known painters such as Botticelli or Piero della Francesca who were to influence his work, and despite his uncertain income Burne-Jones seems to have been welcomed by her parents as a fiancé for Georgie Macdonald. His repayment for her loyalty was a steamy affair with the flamboyant Greek artist Maria Zambaco, the muse for some of his most famous paintings, as were also some of the pale and interesting younger women with whom he liked to flirt. Highly successful and made a baronet in his lifetime, Burne Jones was a prolific artist, despite his disorganised approach.

It is understandable that Fiona MacCarthy's encyclopaedic knowledge, the result of six year's spent researching Byrne-Jones, led her to produce a work of 536 pages, excluding notes, so heavy that it splits at the seams as you read it (although a Kindle version is available) but I found it on balance a laborious slog not only because of the length but also the structure. The decision to base each chapter on a different location linked to the artist's life in chronological order leads to a fragmentation of themes and repetition of some points. I wanted less description and more analysis and insight that was more than vague suggestions of what might have been the case. What exactly was the goal or philosophy of the Pre-Raphaelites and what was their impact, how did Burne-Jones fit into the group, what was his method of painting and so on? I would have liked more focus on a few major works, illustrated in the text, with a full discussion of each one. I gleaned little more about the painter's personality than may be found in the preface.

If some of the peripheral detail e.g. on the painter's cronies had been omitted, there would have been the space to develop some neglected aspects.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England by Thomas Penn.

A reign which may seem less glamorous and colourful than that of his descendants Henry VIII and Elizabeth proves on closer inspection to be highly intriguing. Penn shows how Henry Senior sowed the seeds for a successful dynasty, and captures the spirit of an age still trapped in medieval superstition, but with the stirrings of humanism, democracy and "enlightenment".

Henry Vll's mistrustful and calculating nature must have been influenced by a youth spent on the run from the Yorkists, often at risk of being traded for funds and military aid from whoever was on the English throne during the final years of the Wars of the Roses. Once king, marriage to a Yorkist princess was not enough to consolidate Henry's tenuous claim nor to deter disgruntled nobles from passing off a string of impostors as say, one of the Princes in the Tower with a better claim.

It is perhaps to Henry's credit that he preferred negotiating to war – setting out early in his reign to fight the French, he allowed himself to be bought off with a pension. He grasped that he needed money, both to impress everyone with great pageantry and ritual but also to purchase influence on the continent, not least with the impecunious Hapsburg emperor.

The problem was the methods used to obtain money. In an increasingly harsh network of tyranny, Henry hired a mixture of shrewd lawyers and thugs to devise means of depriving subjects of their wealth – the lands of widows and orphans, the simple-minded, or those whose loyalty was suspected were taken over and the profits siphoned off; to hold office under Henry, it might be necessary to pay a large sum as security for good behaviour; in an increasingly Kafkesque world , ordinary people could be fined on trumped up charges. All this was done through new committees and courts set up outside the common law, undermining Magna Carta, "concerning the liberties of England".

Ironically, when Henry Vlll succeeded, although two of his father's main enforcers, Dudley and Empson were scapegoated, they were condemned by men who were also guilty and "much of the private system of finance and surveillance" which under Henry Vll's "obsessive gaze" had "assumed primacy over the legally constituted exchequer" was simply made official.

Unlike some reviewers, I did not mind that Penn has tried to leaven his scholarly work with somewhat jarring colloquialisms. I was fascinated by "trivial" anecdotes such as Margaret Beaufort's sudden death after her son's coronation feast, "it was the cygnet that did it", or how when a blue carpet was laid out for a royal procession, the London crowd descended on it afterwards to hack off bits as souvenirs.

Extracting the gold from this book was hard going because of a wordy style, combined with Penn's habit of introducing more minor characters than I for one could absorb: X the step-son of Y who had married the widow of Z's brother, and so on. The background to say, the frustrations of the Calais garrison or the ambitions of the famous scholar Erasmus, bog the reader down in excessive detail.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I by John Cooper.

This begins like a novel with Walsingham, the English ambassador in Paris, risking his life by harbouring a Huguenot in a vain attempt to save him from the St Barthelomew's Day Massacre in 1572. This appalling event was critical in convincing Walsingham of the absolute necessity of preventing a Catholic invasion of England.

Although destined to play second fiddle to Lord Cecil, Walsingham filled a major role as Principal Secretary to Elizabeth, heavily involved in foreign policy, negotiating the thorny paths of her phony marriage plans, promoting early abortive attempts to extend English influence by founding colonies in North America, but most of all organising a network of secret agents to glean evidence of plots amongst Catholics at home and abroad.

Cooper provides a somewhat repetitive but fascinating analysis of how English Catholics who mostly just wanted to be free to worship "in the old way" were hardened into plotting against Elizabeth by the influence of priests who set up seminaries abroad and ventured into England, at great risk and personal cost, to spread the word. It was a vicious circle in which repressive laws, an inevitable result of foiled rebellions and plots, only made the English Catholics feel more persecuted and rebellious. Cooper debates whether Walsingham was guilty of "entrapment" by infiltrating Catholic families with agents who encouraged them to intrigue against the Queen.

Some events, such as the Throckmorton plot, are not easy to follow since they are presented in a rather fragmented way, and the whole structure of the book is a little disjointed, so that the abrupt switch from Walsingham's reliance on ciphers and code breakers to troubles in Ireland and attempts to found a colony at Roanoke feels like reading two fresh books in which he scarcely figures.

Yet, a sense of Walsingham the man comes through clearly: puritanical but not fanatical, loyal and industrious, stymied by the queen's periods of indecision. While giving her lavish presents, he was reduced to debt partly through being obliged to pay for some of his security work himself, not to mention the indignity of having an ungrateful queen throw a slipper in his face. His occasional bursts of written frustration to others seem almost modern in tone, and very human.

A few clear maps would have been useful, say of the ill-fated colony on Roanoke Island, the ports ravaged by Drake in the Spanish Empire, or even the route taken by the Armada. A timeline and list of main characters for easy reference would also assist the general reader. The illustrations are interesting, but need a full page each to do them justice.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead by Paula Byrne.

This very readable biography of Evelyn Waugh focuses on his fascination with the aristocratic Lygon family and the ambiance of their ancestral home Madresfield, which inspired his famous novel "Brideshead Revisited". Paula Bryne recaptures the poignancy of the drama to rival a Shakespearean tragedy in which the cultivated and socially conscious Earl Beauchamp, one of the last Liberal grandees, was driven into exile because of his blatant homosexuality,a victim to the hypocrisy of the day and the jealousy of his brother-in-law, the Duke of Westminster. On the other hand, Beauchamp seems to have used his powerful position to prey upon attractive young servants, rather in the style of a modern celebrity disc jockey.

Paula Byrne paints a sympathetic portrait of Waugh, highlighting his wit, companionship and loyalty to those he liked or admired, his special gift for platonic friendships with women, his courage and cheerful resourcefulness under pressure, "for he liked things to go wrong". Admitting that he was snobbish and often sharp-tongued, she makes allowances for him continually: his outrageous comments were often "meant to be jokes", when in later life he played the part of the crusty lord of the manor "in love with the past" he became a parody of himself, but the knowledge that hosts he thought he was entertaining found him a bore "broke his spirit".

It is interesting how biographies differ. Perhaps wisely for the sake of the length and coherence of the book, the author glosses over his friendships with other writers like Grahame Greene, his unconventional conversion to Catholicism, his possibly neglectful or exploitative relationships with his second wife and children, and the details of the alcoholism and drug-taking which aged him prematurely, drove him into periods of temporary insanity and eventually killed him "before his time". She makes light of the selfishness as when, it must have been through lack of thought, he accidentally started a fire in his father's precious bookroom.

Whom is one to believe? Hugh Carpenter's biography claims that Waugh was not given men to command in World War 2 because he found it hard to relate to working class soldiers. Paula Byrne makes light of Waugh's insistence when in the Royal Marines on "etiquette and proper procedures" and his attempt "to convince the young men how much better the world was before the invention of electricity".

One of the most interesting aspects of the biography is speculation on the extent to which Waugh's writing drew on his own experiences, places he had visited but most particularly the people he knew, often amalgamated to create a character.

With only minor reservations over some repetition which suggests a lack of editing, this book sets Waugh in context and is an inspiration to read more of his work for the humour and quality of the writing, even if much of the social comment now seems very dated.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Injustice: Life and Death in the Courtrooms of America by Clive Stafford Smith.

I was drawn to this book through admiration for lawyer Clive Stafford Smith's dedication to fighting and exposing injustice. It focuses on the case of Kris Maharaj who was sentenced to death for the murder of two business associates in 1986, and as at 2012 has spent a quarter of a century in security gaols, his sentence having been commuted to life on a technicality. As a formerly successful businessman, a British subject whose racehorse once beat the Queen's at Royal Ascot, Maharaj is a far cry from the usual Death Row inmate: poor, black and ill-educated.

By covering the case from every aspect, witness, prosecution, defence and so on, Stafford Smith shows in detail how a man who appears to be innocent could have been found guilty. Maharaj's main error seems to have been that, overconfident of acquittal, he hired a cheap fixed fee defence lawyer. To get a reasonable hourly return, this man cut corners e.g. failing to call vital witnesses to prove an alibi, giving prosecution witnesses an easy ride, not digging out evidence held by police which would have indicated that Maharaj was framed for murders actually committed by a Colombian drugs cartel. There is a also a suspicion that the defence lawyer himself may have been intimidated. Add to this a corrupt judge and police at various points, and a prosecution "conditioned" to regard defendants as guilty and determined to "refashion the evidence to fit their view of the truth", and we see how the guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion.

Stafford Smith also explains how the appeal system is loaded against the defendant. For instance, evidence which was not challenged in the first trial cannot be raised on appeal. This practice is meant to discourage appeals which diminish the public's regard for the legal system, leading the author to observe, "Yet presumably the state should only be allowed to impose punishment if the punishment is just." A further problem is the lack of state funding, to finance either fair trials for penniless defendants in the first place or their appeals.

The author cites the chilling statistic that on average judges he canvassed would accept an 83% level of belief in a person's guilt as sufficient for a conviction "beyond all reasonable doubt". This is enough to lead to the execution of more than 500 innocent people currently on Death Row. Since an academic study shows that two-thirds of "capital cases" feature serious errors leading to a new trial, a fifty-fifty coin toss procedure would lead to a more reliable outcome!

Without undue sensationalism, the author makes a powerful case against the death penalty, but even if you support it, he raises clear concerns over the operation of the justice system in the US, where lawyers, politicians and police are tarnished by shoddy practice and too many have lost sight of the example they should be setting as a large and powerful democracy. We cannot know to what extent his case may be biased in favour of Maharaj, and explanations are at times too compressed when he is trying to present arcane arguments in a book which sets out to be more gripping than many courtroom crime novels. Yet, more than a hundred pages of small-print notes at the end add weight to his evidence.

Overall, "Injustice", which should disturb everyone who reads it, is a major contribution to the cause of keeping alive what freedom and democracy ought to be about.

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⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of The House by the Dvina: A Russian Childhood by Eugenie Fraser.

Her memories of distant childhood perhaps sharpened with age, Eugenie Fraser became an admired author at the age of 80 with a fascinating account of early life as the daughter of a Russian father and Scottish mother, living mainly in Archangel near the Arctic Circle and "midnight sun", in the final years of the Tsar's Empire and the chaos of the Russian Revolution.

Some of her best anecdotes were related to her by relatives, such as her grandmother's courageous journey across frozen wastes, braving frostbite and wolves, despite being eight months' pregnant to beg for clemency from the Tsar to release her husband from prison. At first, it irked me that the author never seemed to question the Tsar's right to exert such power, nor the comfort and luxury in which her family lived. However, having built up strong images of an idyllic childhood, her descriptions of the stupid bureaucracy, incompetence, and gross injustice perpetrated after the Revolution greatly increased my sympathy for her viewpoint. I was impressed by her bitter analysis of the Allied Intervention during World War 1, which only supported the White Army temporarily because it was anti-German, since "in reality the Allies did not care what government took over Russia". As her step-uncle bitterly commented, "Why did they come at all? We shall pay a heavy price for this."

In the middle of the book, I began to find the introduction of an endless succession of Russian relatives too much to take. I grew bored by her preoccupation with trivial matters while "glossing over" important issues such as her parents' relationship. Yet I am glad that I persevered because of the poignant and thought-provoking, not to say exciting, final chapters. She shows not only the intensity of the will and ingenuity to survive, abut also how the strongest spirit may break under intense hardship.

I am sure that many readers will enjoy without criticism the evocation of a lost past, with the exhilaration of the sleigh ride across the frozen Dvina, the camaraderie of the communal baths where even the wealthy went to wash, the observance of rituals and the colourful characters in a large extended family.

Throughout the tale there are continual comparisons between northern Russia and Dundee in Scotland, where Eugenie was fortunate enough to be able to take refuge.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of Tiger Head, Snake Tails: China Today, How it Got There and Where it is Heading by Jonathan Fenby.

Having made his name with the popular "A Penguin History of China: the Rise and Fall of a Great Power", Fenby's study of China today focuses on recent social, economic and political events.

Much of the information provided will no doubt be familiar from newspapers and television documentaries: the astonishing speed of urbanisation, with all the attendant problems of pollution and scope for corruption and substandard construction; the, to a westerner, odd blend of nominal communism and capitalism, as displayed in the coastal Special Economic Zones like Shenzhen; the harsh crackdown on any kind of rival belief system, as in the case of the Falun Gong; the current rejection of democracy or free speech as likely to destabilise society, thus hindering economic progress. Fenby uses extensive firsthand obsevation to combine all this into a single book with many often chilling examples e.g. the artist Weiwei probably fell foul of the authorities by daring to suggest in his blog that the death toll of 80,000 in a Sichuan earthquake was due to corruption in building contracts.

Fenby reminds us how the Confucian tradition of keeping "a tight grip", the control freakery of past emperors are perpetuated into the current "top down rule" which is seen as the necessary framework for economic development.

Fenby has also added to my awareness of issues. For instance, I had not considered how the one child policy has created a "time bomb" familiar to the West, in which the labour force will become inadequate to care for all those too old to work. I had not realised how Deng Xiaoping used foreign technology and capital in the 1990's to enable China to avoid a Soviet-style collapse of communism. Yet by 2001, Premier Zhu Rongji had adopted the slogan "reduce the workforce, increase efficiency" with the kind of cuts and unemployment we might associate with a post financial collapse right wing western government.

The book will date quickly, since it makes a point of discussing the candidates just prior to the 2012 election to replace State President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao in the ten yearly leadership transition. Ironically, Fenby refers frequently to Bo Xilai, the "princeling in his fiefdom of Chongqing", whom we now know to have been disgraced in 2012, perhaps as a way of halting the progress of an influential figure who hankered after a return to some aspects of Maoism.

Although the facts provided are all relevant, I sometimes found them hard to digest, making the book a little dry. It seems to me to lack a clear structure, and as a result at times rambling, even confusing and often repetitive. When I felt bogged down it proved possible to read the chapters in the "wrong" order in an attempt to rekindle my interest. I suspect it may have been "thrown together" in a hurry, which is a pity.

A map of the key cities and states continually mentioned would have been useful. I resorted to printing a map off the internet to help be locate places and areas.

Although this has increased my understanding of a country likely to affect all our future lives, I wish it had been better constructed, and perhaps more reflective.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars