The Memoirs of Madame de La Tour du Pin

I bought this imposing Harvill Press hardback on impulse while looking for something entirely different, and it held me enthralled for five evenings of reading. Before this, I didn't know much about the French Revolution, and I knew nothing about the years between the Terror and Napoleon's coronation. Madame de La Tour du Pin's memoirs … Continue reading The Memoirs of Madame de La Tour du Pin →

Rachel Ferguson’s A Footman for the Peacock: a hatchet job

There is a good novel buried in this sprawling, self-indulgent fantasy of irony and class consciousness. Rachel Ferguson wrote A Footman for the Peacock (1940) right at the beginning of the Second World War: it was her eighth novel and fourteenth book. Comparing it to its immediate predecessor, Alas Poor Lady (1937), one can only assume … Continue reading Rachel Ferguson’s A Footman for the Peacock: a hatchet job →

Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel

Continuing to swash buckles in the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up, we're still in wigland, in the eighteenth century, crossing the Channel and diddling the enemy in disguise, with The Scarlet Pimpernel. First off, what IS a scarlet pimpernel? It’s a flower, a straggling long-stemmed weed-like plant, that grows in boggy places. It comes in … Continue reading Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel →