No comments about The Last Lion Part A: Winston Spencer Churchill, Alone, 1932-1940.

No comments about Roy Jenkins: A Retrospective.

5 comments about The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline.

1. A biography about one of England's most enigmatic and on this side of the pond at least lesser known Queens. Charlotte born into the rather stogy provincal atmosphere of the Hanoverian Court was married off while still a teenager to her first cousin the future King George IV. A dandy and bon vivant who had already contracted a marriage years ago to the attractive and apparently virtuous widow Mrs. FitzHerbert. Alas Mrs. FitzHerbert was not only a commoner but a staunch catholic and George was a spend thrift. When His father refused to continue filling his coffers unless he found himself a proper (i.e. Royal) bride he abandoned Mrs. FitzHerbert and wed poor Charlotte.

   Almost at once however he was repulsed by his cousin (whom he had never before met). After siring one child (a daughter Charlotte) he promptly returned to the far more worldly and appealing Mrs. FitzHerbert. This led poor Charlotte to rebel.

   Her rebellion was to cost her dearly. Leading in the end to a notorioius and flawed trial headed by parliment to decide if she was in fact guilty of adultry.

   Charlotte led a tragic but interesting life. As with Marie-Antoinette it can be said that Charlotte's own bad judgement and ignorance were as much (if not more) to blame for her misfortunes as the ill will of her enemies.

   Overall it was an engaing account of a fascinating woman and period in time. It gave glimpses into the lives of the rest of the British Royal Family. From George's rather embittered maiden sisters to his mad father King George III and his outwardly sweet but meddling mother Queen Charlotte.




2. Whatever were they THINKING!?! I mean, the author, and worse, the editors. This is an appallingly bad book. I staggered through the whole University of California paperback version, convinced that eventually it would improve. Sadly, I was too optimistic.

   Caroline of Brunswick was clearly quite an unpleasant person all 'round. Ill-educated, dishonest, gullible, ill-bred, plain at best, lacking in style and sense, desperate for any sort of attention, she would be difficult to like in the hands of the most talented biographer. It's a shame that she was left to Flora Fraser. This particular Ms. Fraser is living proof that a talent for biography isn't hereditary. She is pendantic, tedious, and apparently without enthusiasm for her subject, whom she abandons regularly in pursuit of political minutiae.

   I was startled by the ineptitude of the editing. In a number of instances the vocabulary used was clearly anachronistic slang, but the quotes were not footnoted, leaving the reader bewildered as to the meaning of the quote. In these instances, the Oxford English Dictionary was no help, surely a responsible standard for an editor of a British/American release? Some quotes are simply inaccurate.

   I suspect the editors may have been overawed by Flora Fraser's lineage, and hopeful of a comparison between Diana Spencer and Caroline of Brunswick. If Caroline was as Flora Fraser describes, there is scant ground for such hopes.

   I majored in British history, am quite accustomed to dry texts, and have read each and every one of Lady Antonia Fraser's splendid works with pleasure. In this case, the daughter should NOT have attempted to go into the family trade, she has no talent for it.

   I very much regret the time I wasted plodding through this exceedingly dull book about a sad, dreary woman who would have been best left to rest in peace.

   And no, to the best of my knowledge, I'm no relation to this branch of Frasers.




3. Flora Fraser writes beautifully, and her research is impeccable. This is one of the best "life and times" set in Georgian England available today. The popularity of Queen Caroline with the populace, always looking for symbols of opposition to the monarchy, makes clearer the similar fascination in our time with as inexplicable a figure as Diana, Princess of Wales. The books is a great read that has something to say, rather like the wonderful Mediterranean histories written by the late Sir Steven Runicman (e.g., History of the Crusades). The Unruly Queen, along with David Gilmour's Curzon, are must reading for those interested in British history.



4. This is a fascinating, almost incredible, true story, but (as reviewers who've preceded me here have pointed out) Flora Fraser hasn't managed to do it justice. Queen Caroline's actions are so baffling, so inconsistent, and so seemingly self-destructive that a writer really must have a "take" on her for a biography to be enlightening or moving. Fraser seems almost afraid to take a stand, or else so mired in her research that she's lost the need for a big picture. The result is that when Caroline veers in completely new directions-- suddenly taking lovers after years of faithfulness to a husband who despised her, or leaving England at the drop of a hat after years of determination to fight her battles there-- the reader gets the (highly detailed) facts without any insights that could help us understand a seemingly random shift. We don't even learn why Caroline, with few marital prospects into her mid-20s, was chosen to marry the future George IV in the first place. It's not even clear whether Fraser likes her subject, approves of her actions, or felt much enthusiasm for the project except as a collector of commemorative objects she calls "Carolingiana." I guess writing biographies is just the family business...
   
   Specific oddities include no real sense of George IV's personality or motivation, the tendency of key people to drop out of the narrative altogether when they're not present in Caroline's life (even those important to Caroline, like her daughter Charlotte), and detailed descriptions of paintings (by one of Caroline's supposed lovers, Thomas Lawrence) that Fraser hasn't actually included in the illustrations. So much is made of the transformation of Caroline's appearance over the years that we really do need to see more from her later life than caricatures and cartoons.
   
   It would seem inevitable that someone will make a great drama out of this story-- as a biography, or even as a play or film. It's a shame that Fraser didn't see that she could convey some of this drama, and real insight, without compromising her extensive research.



5. Both Fraser Mother & Fraser daughter can research a subject to death. However, neither writes gracefully or entertainingly. This book reads like a compilation of notes. Yawn. I'd rather read a loosey goosey Mitford biography, as if I wanted sleep, I'd read dissertations.

No comments about Eugene O'Neill (U.).

No comments about Beaufort: The Duke and His Duchess, 1657-1715 (Yale Historical Publications Series).

No comments about Josiah And Sarah Wedgwood.

No comments about Affair Of State: A Biography Of The 8th Duke And Duchess Of Devonshire.

No comments about Wilde's Devoted Friend: A Life of Robert Ross, 1869-1918.

No comments about Victorian Diaries: The Daily Lives of Victorian Men and Women.

1 comments about Eastern Exchange.

1. The subtitle of this autobiography is "Memoirs of People and Places". The author states that he has always been more interested in people than in places. This interest does not preclude him from giving graphic descriptions of the many countries he has lived in: Iraq, Japan, Morocco, Egypt, Cyprus, Thailand; and also of those he has visited: China, Russia, Sarawak, Sri Lanka, Laos, India, Libya. Being a writer of fiction ( A Touch of the Orient, Uneasy Relations, Doubtful Partners ) he has the novelist's observing eye, and his observations are often entertaining. About the manager of a hotel in Baghdad he has written: "Mr. Yousef was a little man with a boiled-lobster, pock-marked face, and not much hair grew on his small head. His blue eyes were close to his podgy, pitted nose, and his perpetual, twisted smile revealed large yellow teeth. More often than not he was tipsy, even before lunch . . . He would wobble about the hotel lobby like a marionette with a few broken strings, smiling inanely. He was not an unpleasant man, in fact he was a kind one . . ." Going up the Rajang River in Sarawak, he says: " The river was magnificent, powerful, mysterious; mysterious because of the banks shrouded by dark-green jungle, it brown opaqueness, its swift, strong, silent movement, its emptiness. Only rarely did we see another longboat and then it was little more than a speck hugging the other bank.: The title of the book comes from a hotel in Port Said: "Its name caught my fancy the first time I stayed there in the 1940's. My life has been a sort of exchange with the East; an unfair one, perhaps, because I feel I have given less to the East than the East has given to me." Haylock taught English in Baghdad and in Tokyo. He stated that the happiest time of his life was from 1975 - 1984 when he was back in Tokyo "with a well-paid university post, reasonable accommodation, and a wonderful Japanese friend". The author is candid about his tastes. In between teaching there were gaps during which he stayed in various lands (Morocco, Cyprus, Portugal) and visited China and the USSR, as it still was in 1971. In China in 1965, just before the Cultural Revolution, "at the height of the cult, one might say of the deification of Mao Tse-Tung", he was in the stern hands of hard-line guides, who constantly poured tedious propaganda into his unwilling ears. He crossed Siberia by train, having to share a compartment with a ninety-three-year-old Australian woman, who died on the way. Her death was wrongly diagnosed as being due to Cholera and Haylock and the other passengers in the carriage were at Sverdlosk taken off the train and confined in an isolation hospital for several days. The author states "for much of my life I have lived in blissful ignorance in the countries I have inhabited. As an expatriate I have escaped the responsibilities, but not the taxes, which those who properly belong have to shoulder. I have enjoyed being an escapist". Perhaps the author would have written a deeper and less light-hearted book if he had properly belonged. This frank autobiography describes his life, not of adventure, but a varied one full of amusing encounters and unusual situations.