Elizabeth & Philip
Tessa Dunlop
Headline, £20, pp296
Royal historian Tessa Dunlop’s incisive, crisply written book, subtitled “A Story of Young Love, Marriage and Monarchy”, uses oral history techniques to help give the familiar tale of the relationship between the youthful Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip context and texture. By contrasting verbatim testimonies of ordinary people with the rarefied life of the royal couple, Dunlop gives the narrative greater immediacy and relevance than it might otherwise have possessed, while elegantly conveying a kaleidoscopic vision of 40s Britain on the verge of change.
Now She Is Witch
Kirsty Logan
Harvill Secker, £16.99, pp340
“Witch lit” has been tipped to be one of the major trends of 2023 publishing, and Kirsty Logan’s mesmerising and evocative novel represents an imaginative triumph in this new subgenre. Now She Is Witch revolves around Lux, an outcast whose late mother was believed to be a witch, and Else, a seductive stranger who is accompanied everywhere she goes by a wolf. There are echoes of everything from the Brothers Grimm to Angela Carter in Logan’s deceptively simple storytelling, but its feminist themes are persuasively conveyed without heavy-handed overstatement.
Butler to the World
Oliver Bullough
Profile, £10.99, pp304pp (paperback)
Oliver Bullough’s illuminating study of the dirty money coursing through Britain has the slogan “the book the billionaires don’t want you to read”. Bullough’s angry, fascinating study of corruption and power in modern-day geopolitics has the pace of an airport thriller and the righteous zeal of a prosecuting barrister. Not that most of the malefactors featured will ever see the inside of a court; the complicity of a system that has made them wealthy means that prosecution, while deserved, is out of the question.
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