He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Lacey includes some witty surprises-e.g., John Locke once attended the autopsy of a lion-and he offers a sly allusion to Wellington’s pulling on his boots.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. Mary Godwin did run off with Percy Bysshe Shelley, but not, as the author says, to marry him they were joined in a London church two years later in the presence of her father. Crippen, which unsuccessfully attempted to turn an Edwardian murder into a 1960s West End musical. It’s odd that Lacey doesn’t mention the rock group that adopted the farmer’s name, perhaps slightly less so that he neglects to tell us about Belle, or the Ballad of Dr. But there are quiet and unexpected entries, too: the origin of the word “Luddite,” the publication of 1066 and All That (a book he greatly admires), the inventive 18th-century farmer Jethro Tull. Many of the selections offer no surprise: the Charge of the Light Brigade, the reign of Queen Victoria, the abdication of Edward VIII. He writes about nasty stuff floating in the Thames, and the squeamish should avoid his graphic paragraphs about the brutal breast-cancer surgery, sans anesthesia, endured by novelist Fanny Burney in 1811.

Johnson’s dictionary, the rise of trade unionism) with the alarming and/or disgusting. Crippen), the culturally or socially significant (Dr. He juxtaposes the sublime (Waterloo, the Battle of Britain) with the criminal (highwayman Dick Turpin, murderer Dr. Veteran historian and biographer Lacey ( Grace, 1994, etc.) maintains the appealing conversational style of his two earlier installments. The conclusion of an entertaining three-volume hopscotch through English history, this one taking us from John Locke to Francis Crick.

Grace by Robert Lacey