MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

QUEEN VICTORIA’S MATCHMAKING by Deborah Cadbury

(Bloomsbury £10.99, 400 pp) GRANDPARENTS and grandchildren often share a special bond, and Queen Victoria took a particularly keen interest in her 42 grandchildren.

Her husband Albert had cherished a vision that his children would establish a network of marital alliances across Europe, uniting the continent, with Britain at its head.

Albert died before realising his vision, but Victoria, determined to carry out his wishes, took an energetic role in steering her grandchildren towards suitable suitors.

They proved resistant to her advice. The hapless Prince Eddie inconsiderately died six weeks before his wedding to May of Teck, who was married off to his younger brother, the future George V.

Deborah Cadbury’s rather fascinating history traces the often tragic destinies of Victoria’s grandchildren.

ANTHONY POWELL by Hilary Spurling

(Penguin £20, 528 pp) THE novelist Anthony Powell, a contemporary of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, is best remembered for A Dance To The Music Of Time — his 12-volume cycle of novels depicting British life in the mid-20th century.

An intensely private man, he managed, according to his biographer Hilary Spurling, almost to leave himself out of his own memoirs.

In this affectionate biography, Spurling gives a vivid portrait of the writer: his lonely childhood, Eton schooldays and the seedy London of his 20s, where he worked for a publisher and had an affair with the painter Nina Hamnett.

Success came slowly — Powell didn’t begin to write A Dance until he was 45. But Spurling’s elegantly written biography confirms his reputation as a novelist of the very first rank.

ROGUES’ GALLERY by Philip Hook

(Profile £9.99, 288 pp) ‘ART dealers are purveyors of fantasy. . .the sort of fantasy that stimulates soarings of the imagination and tantalising glimpses of highly remunerative investment,’ writes Philip Hook in his entertaining history of art dealing.

By the 17th century, an international art market was well-established; but while fortunes were to be made, the business of placating demanding buyers and temperamental artists could be stressful.

No detail was too small for the powerful 20thcentury dealer, Joseph Duveen, who would place calls to the valet of the collector Maurice de Rothschild, to learn whether the state of his bowels made it a good day on which to offer him a masterpiece.

‘The history of art dealing,’ Hook concludes, ‘is the story of human folly, interspersed with occasional acts of heroism.’