MUSTREADS ISLANDER by Patrick Barkham THE GREEDY QUEEN by Annie Gray PATRONISING BASTARDS by Quentin Letts
Out now in paperback
(Granta £9.99) ‘ THE cliché is that Britain is an island nation,’ writes Patrick Barkham, ‘but it is, of course, several nations that share innumerable islands. We might count 6,000, or more if we include riverine islands, man-made islets or rocks revealed by the tide. Of these, about 132 islands are permanently inhabited.’
According to the novelist D . H . L awrence, small islands are dangerously seductive places for people seeking escape who swiftly discover that they cannot escape themselves.
With a fondness for islands dating back to his childhood holidays, Barkham decided to test Lawrence’s theory, visiting 11 islands, from the Isle of Man with a population of 85,000, to the tiny, uninhabited Essex island Ray.
Barkham’s elegant, perceptive and often very funny book is an evocative celebration of the charm of small islands. (Profile £8.99) WHEN Victoria, his daughter, was born in 1819, the Duke of Kent described her ‘as plump as a partridge’.
Eighteen years later, when she ascended the throne, the sharp-penned society diarist Charles Greville recorded that the young Queen ‘eats quite as heartily as she laughs. I think I may say she gobbles’.
A year later, Victoria shared with her prime minister, Lord Melbourne, her horror on discovering that she weighed nearly 9st (she was only 5 ft 1 in).
In this entertaining account of Queen Victoria’s eating habits, the food historian Annie Gray records not just the monarch’s surprisingly eclectic tastes in food (she was fond of a glass of beer and an authentic curry, ‘made by one of my Indian servants’), but a century of culinary change.
‘In many ways,’ argues Gray, ‘the Victorian period saw the birth of modern food culture.’ (Constable £9.99) ‘THIS is a work of peppery polemic . . . It represents the subjective views of a scurvy parliamentary sketchwriter, critic and Marches blunderbuss, no more, no less,’ writes Quentin Letts in the ‘Note to readers (and libel lawyers)’ that prefaces his invigorating jeremiad about all the people he most detests: ‘The sticklers and swaggerers, the hectoring Snoots Who Know Best . . . the technocrats who dehumanise our country’s institutions.’
Letts identifies a ‘smug, self-perpetuating, invisible Brahmin class . . . a furtive elite driven by the desire to own minds, not acres’, who received a richly deserved brace of ‘kicks in the kidneys’ with the results of the 2016 EU referendum and the 2017 General Election.
His range of dislikes is gloriously catholic, encompassing luvvies, life peers, modern art, clean eating, corporate mission statements, the decline of proper hymns in church, the health and safety brigade and much, much more.