In what one scholar called “the literary event of the decade,” on 2 January 2020, Princeton University Library opened up more than 1,100 letters that the Nobel-Prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot wrote over the course of three decades to an American speech professor and amateur actress named Emily Hale. The day became even more newsworthy
While wandering around China in late September last year, on the interminable bus and high speed train journeys, I managed to read through my colleague at King’s College, John Bew’s new biography of Clement Attlee, Citizen Clem (Quercus 2016). This is an Amazon affiliate link for your convenience. We also encourage you to buy from
I have a new sympathy for the historians I’ve worked with over the years, people who spend their time in archives and agonize over footnotes. They want to get the facts right, and I can now see that our easy acceptance of anecdotal information as historical fact is troubling. Was Valerie Eliot, as she claimed, on the school playing field when a German plane flew over in 1943?
