The Price of Safety

Clair Wills: Constance Marten’s Defiance, 14 August 2025

... with her family. Marten’s paternal grandmother, Mary Anna Sturt Marten, was a goddaughter of the QueenMother; George VI attended her wedding. Marten’s father had been a page to Queen Elizabeth II. The papers ran ...

I adore your moustache

James Wolcott: Styron’s Letters, 24 January 2013

Selected Letters of William Styron 
edited by Rose Styron and R. Blakeslee Gilpin.
Random House, 643 pp., £24.99, December 2012, 978 1 4000 6806 7
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... of the playwright Lillian Hellman, whom Edmund Wilson would describe in his journals as the queen bee of the Martha’s Vineyard ‘cocktail belt’, Styron and Rose would become champion party-throwers themselves up in Roxbury, Connecticut, between work-slogs. But by the year of Kazin’s Christmas report, the ...

Whirligig

Barbara Everett: Thinking about Hamlet, 2 September 2004

... Caligula and Nero, he had a weakness for horrible women: his last wife, Agrippina, Nero’s mother, set about getting her son the throne by poisoning Claudius once he had adopted Nero. After Nero came to power he murdered Claudius’ son Britannicus; and then, before he was 16, Nero married Claudius’ daughter Octavia. Thus the pathetic Octavia was ...

Not Even a Might-Have Been

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Chips’s Adventures, 19 January 2023

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1024 pp., £35, March 2021, 978 1 78633 181 6
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-43 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1120 pp., £35, September 2021, 978 1 78633 182 3
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1943-57 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1168 pp., £35, September 2022, 978 1 5291 5172 5
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... of background Channon yearned for: a Nicolson baronetcy had been created by Charles I, and on his mother’s side he was related to the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Where some people reinvent themselves to disguise a lowly upbringing, Channon tried desperately to shed his origins as the son of a rich shipowner – ‘I have put my whole life’s force into ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... she got to know the other young mothers. As well as befriending Naseem she was close to another mother from the tower, Munira, who lived on the fifth floor. It was a strong Muslim community: many were from the Middle East, but a sizeable number were from Morocco, and some of the local boys referred to Grenfell Tower as ‘the Moroccan flats’. ‘It was ...