“Anne Sebba tells this harrowing story with tremendous rigour and care, capturing both the complex horror of the women’s situation and the dignity and bravery with which they faced it. An impressive, important, deeply moving book”
By Sarah Waters
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One of my favourite moments in the publishing cycle is when you’re asked to talk about your book as part of a fundraising event. Using your research to raise money for worthwhile charities like The Victoria Foundation is not only a (selfishly) feel good moment but it’s great to be surrounded by people again after years of research and writing which are lonely even without a pandemic. This was a terrific local event (amazing food and company) and I’m already looking forward to one or two others in the run up to Christmas. Do ask me … I’m available now before I start another book!
Photos taken below by the talented Vicki Sharp.
Read Rebecca Abrams’s review in the Weekend FT Life and Arts (21-22 August 2021)
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Read Rachel Cooke’s review of Ethel Rosenberg in The Observer (27 June 2021)
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On June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by electrocution for their part in a conspiracy to provide to the Soviet Union top secret information on the development of nuclear weapons. Their co-conspirators received long prison sentences, but the Rosenbergs became the first American civilians to be sentenced to death in peacetime. Read More
Because we humans are (mostly) a perverse bunch, being told I can undertake only one form of exercise a day makes me want to spend the whole day running, jumping, skipping, cycling. It’s not as if I ever did that but, just because I can’t, I want to! In this weird new world where the government is not simply telling me how to live my life but actually ordering me how to do it, it would be so easy to collapse under a pile of negativity or anxiety or to rebel – How do they know whether or not I have already been out once? But actually it’s not difficult to play the game and do what I am told because I know all our lives depend on it, mine included. I have in any case spent the past two years in semi isolation, desperately trying to write a book in the immediate aftermath of my husband’s sudden death and deal with probate, a situation guaranteed to lure anyone into depths of depression even without associated grief. What kept me going was my mantra ‘once the book is done’ I shall be free …. free to spend a week at a spa, free to travel wherever I wanted, free to meet all the friends I have had to shun so rudely over the past two years. Even free to behave badly. Read More
A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR holds the hand of his granddaughter during the annual ‘March of the Living’ at Auschwitz in May 2019
(photo credit: REUTERS/KACPER PEMPEL)
What makes two people with identical backgrounds turn in completely opposite directions? I have just finished a fascinating book called The Horror of Love by Lisa Hilton about the relationship between Nancy Mitford and her French lover, Gaston Palewski. I thought I knew all I ever needed to know about the Mitford sisters (and perhaps I did) but reading it made me struggle with this question once again? Of course with the Mitfords – Unity and Diana, the Hitler worshippers and Jessica, the communist – the problem is writ larger than in most families. Nancy vehemently opposed both extremes and devoted herself to writing (Love in a Cold Climate) not politics (Palewski was one of General de Gaulle’s closest advisers). Read More
