T. Hodgkins

A fascinating story of two pathetic people

Reviewed: 04-04-24

This was a fascinating read. I knew the basic story of the abdication and I had some idea of what Edward and Wallis were like from other sources, especially their dubious political affiliations, However, what comes over in this book is quite how pathetic and vile both Edward and Wallis really were, he with his baby talk to Wallis (and the dogs according to later chapters in the book) and his obsession with that woman, her with her desperation to get out of her relationship with him, but liking all the things he could give her too much to really get out. If two people deserved the shallow, empty lives they lived after the abdication, they certainly did. I started the book wanting to like Wallis, wanting to see her as the real victim of the abdication, the woman who had been vilified by the world for stealing a King, only to spend her life with an obsessive fool who wouldn’t let go. Though I still think Edward was an obsessive fool, a ridiculous man with absolutely no backbone or thought for other people, I now also see how shallow, selfish and hateful Wallis was. Neither of them have any redeeming features at all. Neither was attractive, far from the matinee idol image he’s had, looking at pictures, I think he looked old by the time he was 40, and she was distinctly masculine in her appearance. Neither had any real intelligence or personality. They must have been a nightmare at dinner parties. Listening to a book about two people who were equally ghastly wasn’t easy, in fact it was a struggle at times, but at the same time their story is strangely fascinating. If it was a fictional story you’d hope that in the end their characters would reform and they would become complete people, but reality isn’t like that. They died as they had lived, shallow, weak, pathetic and unlikeable. My advice to other listeners is to stick with it, if only because Samantha Bond reads it well.

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Harrowing To Listen To

Reviewed: 16-01-24

I’ve just finished listening to Nick Wallis’s book in the aftermath of the Mr Bates vs The Post Office drama and its accompanying documentary. I knew a little about the scandal before the drama opened all our eyes to the 20 years plus the former subpostmasters and subpostmistresses have lived through, but I find it almost unbelievable to take in how every time more is revealed about the scandal, such as in this book, it gets more and more shocking. Some parts of the book are quite techie and I can’t pretend to have understood all of it, but what brings the book to life is what those who have suffered so much have to say about their experiences and how they were dealt with and the many ramifications of what they have been through. How those involved in causing what must be the biggest miscarriage of justice in the history of the UK, sleep at night is utterly beyond me. My heart aches for all those who either died because they couldn’t live with what they were going through, or died in the aftermath of the so called ‘justice’ they received, or simply became old or too ill while they were waiting to have convictions quashed or to receive compensation for their suffering, that they died waiting for the truth to come out. I hope and pray that their families and all the people who have suffered so much will now get the financial redress they deserve and that the full truth of how the Post Office was able to behave so appallingly to so many for so long, will finally be dealt with.

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Not for the faint hearted, but a good listen

Reviewed: 10-01-24

Having listened to the audiobook, I wouldn’t recommend Vital Organs, Suzie Edge’s second book, to anyone of a delicate nature. Some of the stories of body parts from well known figures, From Louis XIV to Hitler and beyond, is a bit gruesome, but some of the details are fascinating and some genuinely moving. This book didn’t quite capture my interest in the same way as Edge’s Mortal Monarchs did, but it is worth listening to. This book might be slightly better if Edge could lift her reading voice to something other than a rather flat monotone, but perhaps that would spoil the dry wit she seems to adopt when relating some of the most colourful stories. My overall feeling is that though I will probably go back to listening to Mortal Monarchs again, I’m not so sure about this one. Perhaps it is one of those things that once you’ve listened, you’ve listened. End of story.

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Excellent book

Reviewed: 07-01-24

A very enjoyable listen, well written and narrated by the author. Such a subject should be gruesome, but instead it is thoroughly entertaining.

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Excellent take on a person we think we know

Reviewed: 07-10-23

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Having read and watched a lot about Anne Boleyn, I wasn’t sure what I would learn about her, but I was wrong.


A political context to Anne’s downfall has often been suggested, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it so well explained before. I think it would have been an interesting addition to look into Cromwell’s own motives a bit more for getting Anne and the men out of the way, to look at what I think of as the ‘Wolf Hall theory’, ie that Cromwell might have wanted to destroy Anne and the men in revenge for the loss of his dear Thomas Wolsey in addition to his desire to do what Henry wanted, as I believe is likely, but I’m sure this would be difficult to prove. I’d also like to have seen a bit more questioning of Henry’s opinions on the charges against Anne and the men. I don’t believe for a moment Henry ever thought the charges were true. I think he believed what he wanted to believe because he wanted Anne not only out of his life, but out of existence.

Those minor observations said, my only real objection to this, the audiobook, is the narrator. It might have been helpful if she’d done a bit of research to find out how to pronounce names. Her pronunciation of Boleyn as ‘Berlin’ throughout the book soon becomes grating. ‘Bullen’ would have been close because it’s possible it is how the name was spelt at the time, allowing for the non standardisation of spelling and how people heard and pronounced names, but ‘Berlin’ is just wrong, as is the pronunciation of Paulet as ‘Powlet’. These things could have been put right, but I have to admit they don’t spoil the enjoyment of an excellent book.

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Interesting book ruined by narrator

Reviewed: 04-03-23

I had high hopes of this book because though the story of Princess Charlotte’s tragic death is fairly well known, not much is said about her life.

Sadly, a book that really did have the potential to be very interesting, was made quite difficult to plough through because of the terrible narration. On several occasions her dull and robotic delivery was so boring, I fell asleep and missed bits of the book. Still, I suppose the book could be recommended as an insomnia cure, but that doesn’t seem fair to say because it wasn’t the writer who was at fault. It was the terrible narrator. I could have lived with her mispronunciation - I have never heard Esher pronounced quite like that, or, for that matter, monarchy, but I could overlook that. What is difficult to overlook is the lack of interest in the subject the narrator shows. She treats the book as nothing more than a telephone directory.

Unfortunately, having listened to this once, I don’t think I could listen to it again, unless it was read by a different narrator.

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A very good book spoiled

Reviewed: 04-03-22

I’ve just finished this audiobook by Lucinda Hawksley. I found the content fascinating. I would love to be able to say I thoroughly enjoyed it, but unfortunately I’m unable to say that wholeheartedly because of the maddening narration. Seemingly unable to read punctuation or read in a way that adds anything at all to the content, I was tempted to give up several times, but I’m glad I persevered. Princess Louise seems to have been a remarkable woman, and though I’m sorry we may never know the answers to certain key questions about her life, I’m rather glad she will keep her secrets. I can definitely say Lucinda Hawksley’s book is worth reading, but the audiobook needs a new narrator.

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1 person found this helpful

Interesting book, poor narration

Reviewed: 06-12-21

I've never read any of Jane Ridley's work before, but I have come across her on several TV documentaries, especially Queen Victoria's Children and documentaries on Edward VII, so I was expecting this to be good. On the whole I wasn't disappointed. Though I can't say I came out of the listen knowing much more about George V in terms of basic facts, or that I understood more about how his mind worked, I did find myself more able to sympathise with a man who has so often been portrayed as dull and not very bright.

The thing that really lets this audiobook down is the reader. She manages to make what really could have been a very good book come across as dry and uninteresting. I'm not sure Jane Ridley could have done a better job herself, she speaks quite quickly and would probably have read in the same way, but someone who has a more interesting voice would have been a good idea.

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How to stretch a short story, by Gareth Russell

Reviewed: 27-02-21

The title of my review should have been the title of Young and Damned and Fair, because it really stretches Katherine Howard's story to.the nth degree. I would suggest the story could have been told effectively in half the number of chapters really, but perhaps the author was being paid by the word or something.

Having just listened to the Wolf Hall trilogy and then Dairmaid MacCulloch's biography of Thomas Cromwell, I thought I'd played the wrong title when I started this, but no, we begin at Cromwell's death on the day Henry VIII married Katherine. That's fair enough, one might argue. Cromwell ultimately died because he encouraged the marriage of Henry to wife number 4, Anne of Cleve, a marriage that failed from the start because Henry didn't fancy his bride, which paved the way for wife number 5, Katherine. Rolling out what then begins to feel like the entirety of the history of the Howard's and Henry's marital history seems not so much an exercise in giving Katherine a background, but padding out a story to the very limited, and it soon becomes boring, even to some with an avid interest in the Tudor period.

Without reading the book, where I assume sources would be stated, it is hard to know where Gareth Russell gets his information from for a lot of his evidence. Using another biography as proof that Jane Roachford, undoubtedly pivotal to Katherine's liaisons with Thomas Culpepper, did not frame her own husband, George, Viscount Roachford, ensuring he was charged with incest with his sister, Anne Boleyn, seems very flimsy to me, when many historians seem able to demonstrate that she did exactly that. The story (I can't call it a book for obvious reasons) is littered with similar assertions that certain events did not happen or have been misunderstood, without any real evidence of where Gareth Russell is getting his facts from, if not these supposedly wrong sources.

Even in the author's note there is at least one glaring error. Even in the period the Tudors knew 'the sweat' or rather, sweating sickness, was not plague, but something distinctly different. It was not considered then, and has now been proven, not to have been a type of plague, as the author states so decisively. Sweating sickness is now believed almost certainly to have been a form of hantavirus that manifested swiftly and often killed in hours. It was not a type of plague.
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Knowing the narrator, Jenny Funnell, from her performance as Sandy in the BBC comedy As Time Goes By, I had hoped she would be good to narrate this, but her voice is wrong somehow. She was clearly trying to bring some magic into her narration, but instead she makes parts that already seem incredible entirely unbelievable. She comes across as if she's reading something akin to a second rate attempt at Harry Potter rather than a history book.

Al in all, this was an attempt to stretch out the little we know for sure about Katherine Howard into a long story. It doesn't work because so much is based on probably, maybe and the use of questionable sources. My only abiding feeling on reaching the end is relief, that and the burning desire to know what David Starkey and Alison Weir would make of it.

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