The late 1960s. Celebrity playwright
Oliver Lindall has assembled his team of players for the premiere of
his new play When Winter Comes. For the author, first-night
nerves won’t be his only obstacle. Among his troupe is Simon Baird,
chosen for his acting skills, yet known for his reputation. Baird has
brooding class resentments and is as likely to wreak destruction as
shine in any new production. When the play finally premieres, we
still don’t know what it will be: more plaudits for Oliver Lindall,
or chaos at the hands of the hugely talented, mercurial Simon Baird?
In the climax of O’Connor’s The Terrorist we are delivered
not only a verdict, but one further question: who actually owns the
finished production – the playwright, the players, or the audience
played to? Simon Baird has his answer, and demonstrates it
graphically.
‘A gem.’ Publishers Weekly on Garry O’Connor’s William Shakespeare: a Life
‘A fascinating biographical study of a stellar acting career – including the secrets that lie behind it.’ Simon Callow on Garry O’Connor’s recent biography of Ian McKellen
‘Garry writes a racy, opinionated and very readable account of life and loves in the English theatre since the 1960s, based often on his own experiences…’ Bamber Gascoigne
‘…an unusual and absorbing book…. I really felt you knew the wiles and shenanigans that go on behind the scenes. Mad, troubling, desperate and funny – I fell around with laughter when poor Oliver got locked in that office. And of course in Simon you’ve created a memorable monster. I thought of several such – Williamson, who drove poor Terry Hands mad by botching his lines as Lear, Harris, Burton perhaps, possibly the rather nice and very self-questioning Hopkins, but above all Oliver Reed, who once threatened someone I knew with a shotgun and drank for England, Scotland and both bits of Ireland. However, Simon is a character in his own right!’ Benedict Nightingale
The Terrorist is available for pre-order at the following online retailers:
Christian apologetics is an important area of
intellectual endeavour and achievement, standing at the boundaries
between theology, philosophy and literature. Yet it has been largely
neglected by historians of literature and ideas.
In these essays, the author
attempts to establish apologetics as a subject deserving of respect
in its own right. He analyses the apologetic arguments and strategies
of four of the greatest Christian apologists of the twentieth century
– Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, and C. S.
Lewis. He shows how different lines of argument support each other
and converge on the same conclusion: that what Chesterton called
‘orthodoxy’ and Lewis ‘mere Christianity’ represents the
fundamental truth about the relations between human beings, the
universe, and God.
A new book on four of the greatest Christian apologists of the 20th C – Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, C. S. Lewis, available at Amazon USA and Amazon UK
You see, / It’s all a decree, / An ideology, / When the prince and his mistress / Are a mote in the eye. / The imperium says they must die.
According to standard encyclopaedia entries, Baroness
Maria Vetsera, a girl of seventeen, began relations with Rudolf,
Archduke and Crown Prince of Austria, in October 1887, and for
reasons still to be puzzled on accepted his offer of a suicide pact.
The official story is that Rudolf had ideas for himself as a future
King of Hungary, who in that role would resuscitate a Kingdom of
Poland. But there were forces against him, and he was frustrated in
these efforts, and furthermore was unhappy in his marriage – hence
his mistress Maria Vetsera.
On
the morning of the 30th of January 1889, he and Maria were found shot
dead in the hunting lodge at Mayerling. The emperor and his advisers
in attempting to disguise the facts only provoked rumours, though
depression resulting from his political isolation is recorded as the
best explanation of Rudolf’s suicide.
Now
for the unofficial story—
We
begin in the crags and bluffs of a landscape brooding under a leaden
sky, and a filthy night of rain. A coachman hunched in the folds of
his coat moaned at his secret mission, and paused mid-oath when a
reddish-looking ember streaked across his horizon. He watched through
the slits of his eyes as it gently arced to earth, and in a pirouette
of orange flames cratered the hillside. There it fizzed out abruptly
– two intertwining twists of smoke under an icy sheet of rain.
His
coach had been newly retouched, and gleamed in the violet zigzags of
light forking through the valley. He thundered on, through the mud
and ruts, almost overturning where two enormous boulders – grey,
sluggish shapes – loomed from nowhere through the rain. Abruptly
the road twisted and rose, fell and rose again, then plunged finally
into the forest. He lashed at the horses, and had as his sole thought
his destination – only his destination – and how to accomplish
that without mishap.
Borne
along with him were two passengers, their embassy the cargo propped
precariously between them. They were brothers – merchant bankers
both – who despite the wrap of expensive furs shivered
uncontrollably. That was because the little flakes of frost that
chilled their blood was fear, a new pang for a pair more accustomed
to life in the rococo drawing rooms their leisured clientele
inhabited. That lumpy sack of cargo wedged between them, all too
ghoulish, and greatly inconvenient, was a cadaver – in fact their
dead niece, who at seventeen had been pretty, vivacious, and a
baroness. Her name was Maria Vetsera, too young and good-looking to
die. Nevertheless that loll of her head, as the coach clattered on
through all those spooky rain-dark pines, told you she was
dead.
The
coachman’s task was to deliver his two bankers and one deadweight
to the monastery of Heiligenkreuz, under whose bell tower a sexton
and his mate had already knocked the soil from their shovels, and
stood waiting by the grave they’d dug. They like the brothers
couldn’t guess at what it was, this prologue all four mummered in –
or that the drama was destined to repeat itself twenty-five
years later.
But
now to Vienna. The year 1889. At that time southern Europe was
dominated by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, under its emperor Franz
Joseph. Its extents were oppressive to some. In its favour there was
breadth of religion, language, culture and economics – those four
monsters hard to tame or control. By contrast, other countries the
emperor ruled had an unhappy knack of self-mutilation, for even then
intractable contours rumpled the cloth, for example the Balkans. We
shall also see there were things the emperor didn’t find amusing. A
case in point was the one thumbprint grazing his escutcheon, in the
person of his son, the Crown Prince Rudolf, whose fads he sought
effective means of dealing with, by excluding him from all functions
or fiascos grounded in affairs of state. You couldn’t be surprised
at Rudolf’s reaction against this, whose interests were counter to
the military education his father had set out for him. His
preferences were natural history and literature. One sultry afternoon
– or so we come to imagine it – Rudolf was thinking of how best
to resist his father’s proscriptions. Activism was one thing, and
required effort, while a life wrapped in cotton wool was a misfortune
reserved for the effortless. With these two at odds, Rudolf
gazed into just that limbo where nothing much of consequence could
ever be achieved by him.
Our
own historical moment must have taught us something of everlasting
monarchs, whose longevity their heirs have to suffer in finding a
role for themselves. That conundrum, when it visited the Habsburgs,
did so on a late January morning in 1889. The emperor had spent
tranquil moments unrolling the scrolls of his signature onto one of
his crested documents, and had planned for an hour with one of his
ladies. Alas that wasn’t to be. The shrill of voices, then the
sudden sweep of his padded doors, shattered that illusion. His wife
thundered in, and had in train the royal physician – a sombre,
spindly man whose coat tails flew up behind him. The emperor, who
paused to catch his breath, nevertheless had to deal instantly with
marital torpedoes fired across his blotting pad.
‘Rudolf
is dead. Rudolf has shot himself.’
The
emperor put away his pen, and was staggered.
Earlier
that morning, Rudolf’s body had been found in the bedroom of his
hunting lodge, in the leafless Vienna woods. To complicate things the
prince had not been there alone. In the same deadly pact the corpse
of Baroness Maria Vetsera rumpled and bloodied the bedding too –
for they’d both been shot.
‘Then
it’s clear,’ the emperor said. That vixen, in a fit of God knew
what, had murdered his son.
His
court physician begged to differ, though trembled as he did so. He’d
examined, he said, both bodies, and had no doubt that the prince had
shot the baroness, then trained the revolver on himself.
‘My
son is not a murderer,’ the sad-eyed king decreed, and that was
true – the emperor’s son was not a murderer.
We
pause for the official course of action, when rumours in Vienna
invaded every drawing room. The emperor’s next instructions were
categorical: to prepare the family vault for the prince’s body.
That was at the Church of Capuchin Friars. The hunting lodge would
close, and re-open as a shrine, with a service. After that came the
official investigation, which the emperor ensured was headed by Baron
Krauss, the top man at that time in the Vienna police. Krauss would
report to the emperor, and reporting to Krauss was Baron Friedrich
d’Oc.
Krauss
took immediate action over the Vetsera burial, which went ahead,
symbolically, under an angry, swollen sky, and was veiled in secrecy.
It was, potentially, the biggest scandal of European society – just
that sort of state dilemma the d’Ocs, with their wealth,
connections, and more important a centuries-old diplomacy, were
trusted to dampen down. Therefore what history fails to record is
Friedrich’s velvet glove, and the iron claw that drew it on.
Gathered in its grip were members of the press, whose hold on things
correspondingly diminished. Even Moritz Szeps, a close friend of
Rudolf’s, and proprietor of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt,
couldn’t do more than mumble into his pocket handkerchief. What
paragraphets he manufactured offered nothing conclusive, with the
revelation only that Rudolf – or rather he and his ‘paramour’ –
had been shot dead at Mayerling, a village on the
Schwechat River, about twenty-five kilometres southwest of Vienna.
The hunting lodge is now a Carmelite convent.
The
barons Krauss and d’Oc did a thorough job, and made sure no one was
able to say what had prompted these events. Inextricably bound to
them was the emperor’s wife, Elizabeth – Empress of Austria and
Bavaria (and also Queen of Hungary).
One
person Elizabeth might have trusted was the ambitious Count Andrassy,
who as the most powerful man in Hungary sought to extricate its
kingdom from the empire. He was backed in this by Bismarck, the
German Empire’s first chancellor (1871–90), whose influence on
European politics left its mark on the dual murders of Mayerling.
Emperor Franz Joseph had too readily bowed to his medic’s opinion,
even if it made his son a murderer, or worse than that, guilty of the
mortal sin of suicide. Against all, he ordered the crown prince laid
to rest in the imperial vault – with no post mortem, and no
inquest. There was a token investigation, entrusted to Baron Krauss,
whose job included the disposal of Maria Vetsera’s remains, but of
course, only the moment’s Realpolitik drove these things
along. The secret treaty of 1877, between Russia and Germany,
amounted to a handshake effectively uniting the emperor’s two
biggest enemies.
That
was a treaty the crown prince was likely to approve of, and that
surely made Rudolf’s suicide unlikely. He’d been eliminated, for
fear of what politically he was likely to develop into. Franz Joseph,
the prince’s father, saw to his removal, with the barons Krauss and
d’Oc trusted to do the work and dust his tracks. The emperor’s
motto was: ‘never apologise, never explain’. That served an
empire not simply steeped in power and wealth and military might. To
Franz Joseph, it was something more ancient and much more permanent
than that. It was his on divine trust. If to maintain it meant
sacrificing his son, then unlike Abraham his regal hand would not be
stayed, and Rudolf had to die.
Rudolf’s
successor was his cousin Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose political
thinking was more in line with the emperor’s, but whose domestic
affairs were not as polished. In opting to marry beneath him, any
future offspring couldn’t accede after him. But then on the 28th of
June 1914 he and his spouse were shot in Sarajevo – an
assassination sparking World War I, and a final confirmation that the
archduke wouldn’t succeed to the throne.
You can read more on Maria Vetsera in the novel New King Palmers, winner of the 2018 Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction, available at Amazon USA and Amazon UK
What is a tenor? What makes some tenors great? Why are tenors so rare? Heroes and Lovers suggests answers to these questions and offers critical essays on twenty-six tenors and shorter assessments of thirty-four others. The tenors covered range from Francesco Tamagno, the first Otello, and Fernando de Lucia, both of whom recorded in the early years of the twentieth century, to Joseph Calleja and Rolando Villazón today. The book also comprises an introductory essay and separate essays on the early tenors of the recorded era, the popular tenors, the British tenors, and the specialist categories of Mozart tenors and Heldentenors.
This is a personal selection and it will please, stimulate, provoke, and infuriate in equal measure.
‘This truly is a book for lovers of the art of singing and the tenor voice.’ Alan Bilgora in The Record Collector
The
Burghers of Ceylon traces the origins and history of the
mixed-race populations of imperial Ceylon. It explains how, and why,
those populations emerged, how they developed, how they were
distinguished – and how they distinguished themselves – from the
Europeans and from the native populations. It explores the components
of burgher identity. The author also provides answers to the
following questions. How reliable is the evidence of the Dutch
Burgher Union’s genealogies? How prevalent is racial
misrepresentation, and what were the motives behind it? How were the
mixed-race populations treated by the European colonial powers? What
happened to those mixed-race populations when colonial rule ended in
1948?
The author’s interest in the burghers of Ceylon came about after his mother’s death, when he discovered she was from a Dutch burgher family in Ceylon. Her mother was half English and half native, and her father, Raoul Frank, was a Dutch burgher descended from a long line of German, French, Dutch, Belgian and British European male ancestors, with native or mixed-race female ancestors from the Dutch and British periods in Ceylon.
Once Upon a Time in Paris, a novel by Eliza Granville
Like her last novel, Gretel and the Dark, Once Upon a Time in Paris cleverly combines a fairy-tale element with magic realism: in this case, an account of events in the life of Charles Perrault. Set in Paris in 1695, intertwining historical fact with multiple layers of fiction, Once Upon a Time in Paris invites readers to consider the possibility that the Tales of Mother Goose were not written by Charles Perrault (nor by his son, Pierre Darmancourt, as originally claimed), but by a reclusive figure almost entirely overlooked by history. The novel is set at that point where the tradition of oral story-telling is fast being absorbed by the written word, and our mysterious recluse is caught between the two practices. Once Upon a Time in Paris offers a dazzling new insight into the connection between the ogre of folklore and fairy-tale and the post-Enlightenment feminist struggle.
‘Twists, turns, knots and kinks…’ No shortage of those in this deliciously smart, mischievous and engrossing novel. Not a goose feather in sight – like Perrault’s own fairy tales, Granville’s novel has been written with a swan’s quill. I read it in a sitting.’ Professor Richard Marggraf Turley
‘Real world and fairy-tale blend and interpenetrate until the boundaries between fantasy and reality blur and meld. The relations between fact and fiction, actual and imaginary realities, are continually brought into question in this subtle and always engaging narrative.’ Jon Elsby
Gretel and the Dark, Eliza Granville’s Holocaust novel, was published to great critical acclaim first by Hamish Hamilton, then by Penguin. After those minor houses the only way is up, and CentreHouse Press is outstandingly pleased to have her present novel, Once Upon a Time in Paris, a dazzling new insight into the connection between the ogre of folklore and fairytale and the post-Enlightenment feminist struggle.
A Forgotten Poet follows the fortunes of diffident and reluctant man of letters, Harold Humber, from his early life in the English Midlands, through his post-war career as economist, jazz aficionado, expert in industrial architecture, and, in the final reckoning, author of four slim volumes of popular verse. While still studying for his degree he is besotted by arts bombardier Hugh Monmouth. Monmouth is determined to see that his Exe Set – the name given his group of poets and writers – is written into English bookish history as the driving force in a changing literary landscape. Monmouth uses his family connections with London publishing house Sabre and Sabre to launch his friend Humber into print, and deliver him as ‘the most important poet writing in English now’. That ‘now’ extends over the post-war period, into the counter-culture of the 1960s, into the industrial unrest of the 1970s, into the greed-is-good of the 1980s, through the dot-com bubble of the ’90s, and, after his death, into Sabre’s extensive archive. That archive’s files and papers fall, accidentally, into the ambit of indie publishing, twenty-first-century-style. When reopened, what new revelations are gleaned of the retiring Harold Humber and the narcissistic Hugh Monmouth? What are we to make, in light of new information, of Harold Humber, poet and economist, as we now learn of struggles throughout his working life, and the range of different disguises he met them with?
The
painful fact of Edward II / As Simon Schama must have reckoned / Is
no amount of calming unguent / Damped that ramrod up his fundament.
Edward
II was King of England from 1307 to 1327. Although not over-blessed
with leadership talent, he entered a long, hopeless campaign of
authority over his powerful barons.
He acceded to the throne in 1307 on the death of his
father, Edward I, granting the highest offices to his predecessor’s
most active opponents. He was hated by the barons on assigning the
earldom of Cornwall to Piers Gaveston, who was possibly his lover. In
1311 a baronial committee drew up a document called the Ordinances.
It demanded Gaveston’s banishment and restraint on the king’s
powers over finances and appointments. Edward affected to meet these
demands, sending Gaveston out of the country, though he was soon
allowed to return. The barons reacted by seizing Gaveston and putting
him to death, in 1312.
In 1314 Edward led an army into Scotland when the
Scottish king Robert the Bruce was agitating against English
over-lordship. He was defeated by Bruce at Bannockburn, which secured
Scotland’s independence. Now Edward was at the mercy of Thomas
Lancaster and his group of barons. By 1315 Lancaster had made himself
virtual master of England, but proved to be incompetent. By 1318
Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, with his group of moderates, had
assumed arbitration between Lancaster and Edward. Edward found two
new favourites, Hugh le Despenser and his son, also Hugh. The king
showed his support for the younger Hugh’s ambitions in Wales, at
which point Lancaster banished both Despensers. Edward took up arms
on their behalf. His opponents fell out among themselves, enabling
him to defeat and capture Lancaster, and have him executed.
Free of baronial control, Edward annulled the Ordinances, avenging Gaveston’s death. But too heavy reliance on the Despensers stirred up resentment with his queen, Isabella, who on a mission to Paris became Roger Mortimer’s mistress. Mortimer was one of Edward’s exiled barons. In September 1326 Roger and Isabella invaded England, executed the Despensers, and deposed Edward, whose son, Edward III, was crowned King. Edward II was imprisoned, and according to Simon Schama (and other historians, as well as Christopher Marlowe), was tortured to death, probably with a red-hot poker thrust up his anus.
Peter Cowlam’s novella A Forgotten Poet is available on Kindle USA and Kindle UK
