Bee Wilson

In the spring​ of 1942, Elisabeth Young, a diplomat’s wife living in Surrey, began keeping a ‘register’ of eggs. Each day, she recorded the date and number of eggs laid by her flock of 12 hens, sometimes logging the name of the particular hen who had laid it. She noted whether the eggs were brown or white or ‘brownish’ and any that were double-yolked. At the end...

As well as being obscene, the libels were also decidedly strange. This was swearing as a foreign language by someone who had the vocab but was not sure of how to fit the words together. The phrases ‘poxy ass’ and ‘foxy ass’ often pop up in the libels. The ‘foxy’ in question did not mean ‘sassy’, but decaying like a foxed book. The phrase ‘piss country whore’, a favourite in the letters, is not one that Christopher Hilliard can trace to any known usage. Often, they pile up an excess of adjectives for effect: ‘bloody flaming fucking piss country’, where ‘bloody country’ on its own would do.

The possibility of Gef’s existence was first reported in the Manchester Daily Dispatch in January 1932. A reporter claimed he had visited the Irving household to investigate the ‘animal story’ that had been the talk of the island for several months. On arrival at the farmhouse, he heard ‘a voice which I should never have imagined could issue from a human throat’. The Irvings told him that it was an animal, something like a stoat, weasel or ferret, except that it spoke and sang songs and on occasion offered betting tips.

Not every Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, it turns out, has fits of conscience and bad dreams. Claretta and Mussolini seem to have felt pretty sanguine about their own actions.

To read the Asquith-Venetia letters is to see that Asquith was a weird kind of philanderer. On the one hand, he has all the complacency of a powerful man, who – despite his general aura of Liberal pacifism – seems pretty thrilled to have so many tin soldiers to move around. Yet he also comes across as childishly needy, constantly asking her whether she found some speech he made clever or boring or whether she thinks he acted rightly on some point of national strategy. The Venetia he addresses is partly a daughter, partly a lover, and partly a projection of himself.