Behind Closed Doors
by Seth Alexander Thévoz
Little, Brown 384pp £25 The Week Bookshop £19.99
Throughout their 400-year history, London’s private members’ clubs have had a rather “louche reputation”, said Anne de Courcy in The Daily Telegraph. In the 18th century, they functioned as gambling havens for aristocrats, who would play cards all night, “fuelled by port and laudanum”. They’ve often been symbols of sexual impropriety – most notoriously in 1895, when the Albemarle played a key role in the Oscar Wilde scandal. “Not much seems to have changed, if one thinks of Chris Pincher’s alleged behaviour at the Carlton”, which drove Boris Johnson from No. 10. In Behind Closed Doors, the Swiss-born academic Seth Alexander Thévoz serves up a history of these “enclaves of exclusivity”. The book is full of “riveting snippets”: at the men-only Beefsteak, for instance, all waiters are known as “Charles”, to save members from having to remember their names.
This “compendious and entertaining” volume suggests that in their Victorian heyday, clubs were more progressive than is commonly supposed, said Sue Gaisford in the FT. Both mixed clubs and women-only clubs were common at the time, and strict dress codes were only introduced in the 1950s. Highly knowledgeable as Thévoz is, his partiality to his subject does present problems, said Francesca Peacock in The Times. The phrase “my own club” occurs with “teeth-grinding regularity” (he never lets you forget that he’s a member of the Reform Club), and some of his arguments don’t bear scrutiny – such as his strange claim that London’s earliest clubs were examples of “aristocratic protosocialism”. This is ultimately a book that trades in “prurient details”, without satisfying our desire for “truly indecent nosiness”. It promises to take us behind closed doors – “but at the end I was still stuck at the porter’s lodge”.