A Royal Christmas

Don't blame Prince Albert when looking at Christmas traditions in Britain. They look quite German, but that's all your fault. It all started with the Glorious Revolution and the subsequent import of German George, or King George I. And other foreigners are present, too. Just think pantomime, turkey, and Santa Claus.


Inspector Minahan Makes A Stand

The age of sexual consent was and is a source of perpetual dissent. In 1874, that age of consent was 12. Brothels were illegal in the United Kingdom and thrived. Policemen were invited to sample the goods. They made use of girls and boys on offer. In return, they happened to overlook the brothels’ existence. And that is the more salubrious part of the story.


The Secret History Of Georgian London

If ‘Georgian London’ conjures pictures of large, white, representative buildings, then this book will take you down a peg or two. If you think that your earlier incarnation was sweeping down majestic staircases in beautiful gowns, chances are much higher you would have lived in the gutter. Come to meet the girls and boys widely ignored by Georgette Heyer in her period novels.



Star

Writing biographies is a difficult undertaking. It becomes virtually impossible when writing about a subject where there is nothing interesting to say about. The other extreme can be found when there is so much of the same to tell that it becomes repetitive. This happened to Peter Biskind.


This Party’s Got To Stop: A Memoir

Rupert Thomson has written a novel under the title of memoir. With it, he takes his readers for a ride through hell called family. Numerous book critics were taken in by the word memoir and fell for his ploy of pretend biography; they actually believed it. Reading the published reviews, he was extremely successful despite the fact that plot, style, and hyperbole used are a dead give-away.


The Forgotten Garden

Pan Books published The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton. The author tells the stories of three women of three generations in search of their roots covering a hundred years in the process. While two of them were displaced by no choice of their own, the third is set upon a quest by her grandmother to solve a family mystery.