How to keep a housewife happy!
For some women in the Fifties, a TV and fridge signalled the start of a revolution, as JOHN PRESTON finds in the year’s best history books
PERFECT WIVES IN IDEAL HOMES
by Virginia Nicholson
(Viking £16.99 % £12.74)
ANYONE who assumes that the Fifties was a rotten decade in which to be a woman will find plenty of evidence to support the idea here. A housewife in sussex who inadvertently said ‘ bloody’ in front of her husband had her pearls confiscated for several years as punishment.
Women who wished to please their menfolk were exhorted to ‘be childlike and feminine at all times’. Not surprisingly, a lot of them set their sights depressingly low. ‘I’ve a fridge, a washer and a television set, and that’s all I want in life,’ declared one Newcastle woman.
But, as Nicholson reveals in this often extremely poignant book, it was also a decade in which women increasingly determined to take greater control of their lives.
By the end of the decade, the pace of change had gone from a crawl to a gallop.
Debutantes were no longer being presented at Buckingham Palace and more women than ever were going to university, while a supremely self-confident grocer’s daughter from Grantham called Margaret Thatcher had just been elected to the House of Commons.
DYNASTY
by Tom Holland
(Little Brown £25 % £18.75)
IT’s no accident that Holland’s account of the rise and fall of the Caesars shares a title with one of the most lurid soap operas ever to appear on TV.
This takes the story of Ancient Rome into its bloodiest and most depraved period of all.
The eternal city of 2,000 years ago was a world peopled with astonishing characters.
There was Tiberius, perhaps Rome’s greatest- ever general, who forced his enemies to engage in ‘ unspeakable perversities’; Caligula, who slept with his sisters and almost everyone else he ever met; and Nero, no sexual slouch himself, who had his own mother murdered.
One of Holland’s many virtues as an historian is his ability to construct a barnstorming narrative. The pace never lets up as one blood- crazed maniac succeeds another.
As Ovid said of Julius Caesar: ‘Caesar and the state are one and the same.’
And as Holland said of Caesar: ‘He wrought such slaughter on his opponents that 30,000 of his fellow citizens were left on the battlefield as food for flies.’
THE FACE OF BRITAIN
by Simon Schama
(Viking £30 % £22.50)
SIMON SCHAMA’s history of British portraiture is a riveting
tour de force that tells us as much about our national character as it does the subjects, and artists, concerned.
Taking in everyone from the ‘Rainbow Portrait’ of Elizabeth I (‘no visible body part is left unpearled’) to Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono taken just five hours before he was murdered, Schama proves to be both an insightful scholar and an engagingly indiscreet gossip.
There are some extraordinary stories here, not least that of Sir Kenelm Digby, who commissioned van Dyck to paint a portrait of his wife on her deathbed. He was so taken with the result that he slept beside it for the rest of his life.
GOLD FEVER
by Steve Boggan
(Oneworld £14.99 % £10.49)
In 2008, the price of gold hit $1,000 an ounce for the first time. Three years later, the price had doubled again.
With gold fever breaking out all over the world, Steve Boggan, a former journalist and helpless novice at any form of outdoor activity, goes off to California — site of the original gold rush — to try to make his fortune.
As one of his fellow prospectors tells him, gold itself may not corrode, but there’s nothing in life quite so corrosive.
In fact, his fellow prospectors ( for the most part) are as generous as they are friendly. But it soon becomes painfully clear that none of them is likely to strike it rich.
Every day, Boggan dips his pan in the river and, every day, a single, solitary flake of gold is sitting at the bottom of it.
This charming, self- effacing, often very funny account of Boggan’s own exploits — and those of other prospectors before him — should keep the wolf from his door for quite a while.
HOW TO BE A TUDOR
by Ruth Goodman
(Viking £20 % £15)
IT WAS hard work being a Tudor. For a start, you had to get up very early: people who stayed in bed until sunrise were known dismissively as ‘slugabeds’. nor would they ever have had a bath — no matter how much money they had.
Bathing was regarded as an act of insanity — the Tudors believed that disease entered the body through one’s pores and therefore exposed as little of their skin to the air as possible.
Yet they weren’t as smelly as this might suggest. They attached a high premium to clean underwear, used a lot of herbal perfumes and took good care of their teeth — they reckoned soot was one of the best ways of cleaning them.
As she’s proved before with her previous book, How To Be A Victorian, Goodman has few equals as a popular historian.
NO MORE CHAMPAGNE
by David Lough (Head of Zeus £25 % £18.75)
YOu can learn a lot about someone from the state of their bank balance, as David Lough discovers in this riveting examination of Churchill’s finances.
While Churchill may have appeared to be the epitome of the brandy- swilling, cigarsmoking grandee, in 1949 alone he got through 1,000 bottles of champagne and 250 bottles of brandy: he spent much of his life facing one monetary crisis after another.
Both his parents were spendthrifts and, as a child, Churchill and his brother would sell eggs to supplement their pocket money.
In his 20s, Churchill’s financial woes seemed to be over after he made a small fortune as a war correspondent.
But it didn’t take long for him to lose it all after a series of terrible investments.
The book’s title comes from a memo Churchill sent his wife, Clementine, when he was feeling particularly broke.
‘no more champagne is to be bought — unless special directions are given . . . Cigars must be reduced to four a day.’ Like most resolutions, this one soon went up in smoke.