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Margaret Tudor – queen, regent and hapless intermediary

The history of princesses and queens has become well-trodden ground in the women’s history genre, particularly the Tudors. Linda Porter’s The Thistle and the Rose, a life of Margaret Tudor, queen consort to James IV and mother of James V, provides a refreshing change in subject. Margaret has had to share the stage with some

Repenting at leisure: Early Sobrieties, by Michael Deagler, reviewed

Garlanded with praise from Percival Everett (‘the real deal’), Michael Deagler’s debut novel Early Sobrieties arrives with a fully formed literary voice best described as hysterical understatement. ‘Like all histories,’ Deagler’s twentysomething ex-alcoholic protagonist Dennis Monk tells us early on, ‘my family’s seemed composed of a series of recurring mistakes that, while theoretically avoidable, tended

The irrepressible musical gift of Huddie Ledbetter

Huddie Ledbetter, better known by the prison moniker Lead Belly, was a musical genius born in the southern United States just as Jim Crow laws were starting to bite. He fell foul of an unapologetically racist legal system and ended up serving on a chain gang in 1915, later doing time in state penitentiaries in

An AI visionary looks forward to the best of all possible worlds

In 1993 Vernor Vinge popularised the notion of the Singularity – the point at which exponentially accelerating trends in multiple technologies move out of control in an endless positive feedback loop. Vinge was a science fiction writer; Ray Kurzweil is not. In 1993 he had already pioneered optical character recognition and synthesisers that could precisely

Snobbery in the garden: U and non-U borders

Richard Sudell is the forgotten hero of the gardening revolution in Britain between the first and second world wars. A Quaker, born in Lancashire in 1892, the son of a straw and hay dealer, he left school at 14 and became a gardener, worked at Kew, then went to prison as a conscientious objector in

Will the Olympics ever be politics-free?

The modern Olympics, first held in Athens in 1896 in a genuflection to their Grecian predecessors, was the creation of Pierre de Coubertin, a French aristocrat. As this septet of books shows from allusive angles, Coubertin’s best known quotation – ‘the most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part’ –