Yes! I Can Manage, Thank You

Virginia Ironside ( Quercus, 368pp, £7.99, Oldie price £7.59)

NICOLA GRIFFITH’S Hild tells the story of St Hilda of Whitby, the bare bones of whose life are known through Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the

English Nation. Born around AD 614 and brought up in the court of Edwin, King of Northumbria, Hilda was baptised together with Edwin’s entire court, and went on to found the abbey at Whitby (see picture above), presiding over the synonymous Synod. Renowned for her wisdom, she was influential in encouraging Caedmon, the monastery’s young herder, who was inspired in a dream to sing verses in praise of God. Nicola Griffith’s

Hild is ‘utterly absorbing’, according to Alison Flood in the Guardian, who called it ‘a magnificent and convincing portrayal of a strange, wild, beautiful world’. Anglo-saxon life is depicted

‘in vivid and credible detail’, said Nick Rennison in the Sunday Times, and Michael Robbins in the Chicago Tri

bune particularly admired the way that Griffith represents ‘the complexity of the worlds of medieval women — dyers and weavers and cooks but also doctors and queens’.

James Hamilton’s A Strange Business: Making Art and Money

in Nineteenth-century Britain is a richly detailed study of the art world in Victorian Britain, and tells how ‘artists and a small army of opportunists, art lovers, collectors and businessmen of all sorts used their ingenuity to turn the visual arts into money’, Philip Hensher explained in the Spectator. Rich in anecdotes about artists from Turner to Landseer, the book ‘is most interesting when it deals with less-known figures such as the colourmen, whose new, bright pigments changed the appearance of 19th-century painting’, thought Martin Gayford in the Guardian. ‘Hamilton writes beautifully,’ extolled Lucy Hughes Hallett in the Times. ‘He makes large points succinctly — his passage on the Napoleonic wars, the subsequent deaths of young men, and the boom in demand for funerary monuments is masterly. Seldom have I learnt so much from a single book while simultaneously being so excellently entertained.’

In A Message From Martha, Mark Avery, former conservation director at the RSPB, recounts the cautionary tale of the passenger pigeon, once the world’s most common bird, and its precipitous slide into extinction. In the 19th century, flocks numbering into the hundreds of millions swarmed across the eastern half of the United States, block- ing out the sun. ‘Reports talked of columns up to three miles wide, the birds tightly packed, flying overhead for hours at a time. One nesting site, in Michigan in the 1870s, was 28 miles long and five miles wide, the animals jammed on to any tree they could find,’ marvelled Andrew Holgate in the Sunday Times. The total population was put at ten billion. Yet, less than forty years later, on 1st September 1914, the last of the species, a female named Martha, died in Cincinnati Zoo. The passenger pigeon had been hunted in vast numbers, but Avery concludes that it was the destruction of the great forests of the eastern United States that finally sounded its death knell. ‘He ends by pointing to a British parallel — the much-loved turtle dove, which itself appears to be heading for extinction here,’ warned Michael Mccarthy in the Independent. Yes! I Can Manage, Thank you, by The Oldie’s own Virginia Ironside, is the latest instalment in her series of novels about London granny Marie Sharp which chart the trials and tribulations of ageing, to hilarious effect. Her adventures in this new novel include a handsome lodger, a nightmare neighbour and a kidnapped dog. Marie’s life is further complicated by her close circle of eccentric friends and family. ‘As ever, Marie is the voice of reason in an insane world,’ according to Sarah Lawrence in the Irish Daily Mail, and Wendy Holden in the Daily Mail loved this ‘wonderful’ novel, which ‘abounds with metropolitan flavour and is full of hilarious truths. Marie’s take on Facebook in particular will ring bells with anyone who hates pictures of dogs on skateboards and homilies about learning to dance in the rain.’