THE BOLTER

Name: THE BOLTER
Author: Frances Osborne
ISBN: 978-0-307-27014-6

by Frances Osborne ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 3, 2009

Of interest to royal-watchers and certain strains of anglophiles, perhaps, but a sansculotte may wonder what the point is.

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Sordid tales of aspiration and debauchery among the minor aristocracy of Britain.

Osborne (Lilla’s Feast: A Story of Food, Love, and War in the Orient, 2004) doesn’t mean to malign her great-grandmother, the perpetrator of much bad behavior and the protagonist of this book. Indeed, by her account Idina Sackville earns points for not being a “husband stealer” and for being what one friend called “preposterously—and secretly—kind.” Yet Idina, daughter of the philandering Earl De La Warr, took up with odd company early on. Her parents were unintended role models. Idina’s mother, writes Osborne, married the earl to gain a title, and the earl, known as “Naughty Gilbert,” married Idina’s mother for her money. Eventually, Idina married rich, too—one of the richest men in Britain, in fact, “rich enough for his social ambitions to withstand marrying a girl from a scandalous family.” She spent months designing a Xanadu featuring a “rabbit warren of dozens of nursery bedrooms and servants’ rooms,” but, alas, never got to see the pleasure dome completed, since the marriage turned out to be loveless and lost. Idina moved on, as she would four more times, ending up in British East Africa, where she made a hearty game of spouse-swapping and wound up figuring in stories that, among other things, would yield the aptly titled 1987 film White Mischief, as well as Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love (1945) and other period books—to say nothing of plenty of tabloid tales. Osborne, who writes pleasantly and carefully, hints that Idina was a pioneering feminist, but this portrait makes her appear to be self-absorbed and sad, living out a boozy, wandering and generally feckless life.

Of interest to royal-watchers and certain strains of anglophiles, perhaps, but a sansculotte may wonder what the point is.

Pub Date: June 3, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-307-27014-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009

Categories:

HISTORY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
PARK LANE
by Frances Osborne

- BOOK REVIEW
LILLA’S FEAST
by Frances Osborne

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SELLING WAR

THE BRITISH PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN AGAINST AMERICAN 'NEUTRALITY' IN WORLD WAR II

by Nicholas John Cull ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1994

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A valuable study of how British propaganda helped to bring the US into WW II, which shows too why such a study has been so slow to appear. Nobody comes out of such an examination unscathed. Americans can't feel good about an isolationism so profound that it nearly permitted Nazi Germany to conquer Europe—or about the fact that three months before Pearl Harbor the ``Mothers of America'' were pelting the British ambassador with rotten eggs. Jews cannot be happy about the lobbying they had to do, as late as 1940, to compel the American Jewish Congress to endorse the Allied cause. Admirers of FDR must cringe at the irony in Cull's report of the president's being ``infuriated'' in 1939 by British indecision in response to German aggression. The British bungled, too. The Empire's bureaucracy put every obstacle in the way of American reporting of the Blitz, which was largely responsible for turning the tide of American opinion. Yet, as Cull (History/Univ. of Birmingham, England) notes, ``the cumulative achievement of the British effort was tremendous,'' and he shows how the British changed their propaganda themes during the course of the war: from ``Britain Can Take It'' during the Blitz to ``Give Us The Tools And We Will Do The Job'' in 1941. One is still left with the thought that the change in American sentiment was due less to skillful British propaganda than to the fact that the British authorities finally allowed the American public to know what was going on. As Eric Sevareid put it, the secret to good press relations in London was simple: ``We wanted Hitler to lose.'' Cull sometimes goes beyond the evidence—as in saying that without the American lend-lease program, 1941 would have brought a British defeat. But this is a sensible, thoughtful, and—in revealing the foibles of many key actors—an often amusing book. (16 illustrations, not seen)

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-19-508566-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HISTORY

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VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

THE DISTANT PAST, YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW

by Robert Heilbroner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1995

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More rewarding deliberations on the past, present, and future from economist Heilbroner, adapted from lectures he gave last year at the New York Public Library. Before reaching some equivocal conclusions about the shape of things to come, Heilbroner (21st Century Capitalism, 1993, etc.) spends a good deal of time looking backward. In assessing what he calls the ``Distant Past'' (a period from prehistory to the 17th century), he points out that the material outlook of its peoples was marked by expectations of changelessness. By contrast, advances in technology enabled Western societies from ``Yesterday'' (an era lasting from about 1700 through 1950) to anticipate the future with confidence. But ``Today,'' by Heilbroner's account, the impersonal forces that have influenced, even dominated, the recent past- -science, economics, mass political movements—now give the developed world as much cause for alarm as for optimism. Disturbing cases in point range from environmental loss through persistent brushfire belligerencies, the insecurities of a market economy, and nuclear power. In offering an imaginable appraisal of what might be in store for both the have and have-not outposts of the Global Village, Heilbroner speculates that capitalism will take a variety of nationalistic forms. Over the longer run, however, he argues that civilization cannot achieve the humane progress of which it is capable if market-based free enterprise (ceaseless accumulation) remains the ordering principle. But he's unsure whether civic virtue will best be served by centralized or decentralized political organization, and he ends with the slightly gnomic observation that two ``quite opposite extremes'' might offer paths to a better future: ``The first is effective global government; the second is its abolition.'' Still, even though he doesn't provide a bang-up payoff at the close, Heilbroner offers a wealth of dividends along the way. A worldly philosopher's provocative broad-brush perspectives on what the morrow could bring.