Lucy Lethbridge | The Guardian
- ️Sun May 28 2017
Lucy Lethbridge is the author of Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth Century Britain (Bloomsbury, March 2013). She has also written several history books for children, including Ada Lovelace, the Computer Wizard of Victorian Britain, which won the 2002 Blue Peter Non-Fiction Award.
May 2017
The Greedy Queen: Eating With Victoria review – nothing dainty about these dishes
Annie Gray’s study of Queen Victoria’s eating habits is good on the details but makes some unwise assumptions
May 2016
The Private Lives of the Tudors: Uncovering the Secrets of Britain’s Greatest Dynasty by Tracy Borman – review
Tracy Borman’s engaging attempt to reveal the intimate secrets of Tudor monarchs has one problem: they didn’t really have any
January 2016
Book of the day
Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places by Anna Pavord – reviewAnna Pavord’s account of our evolving love for the British landscape is an intense joy
May 2015
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley review – a mother and child reunion
Charlotte Gordon’s double biography examines the links between Mary Shelley and the trailblazing mother she never knew
February 2015
The Bletchley Girls by Tessa Dunlop; The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories by Michael Smith – review
Two authors offer very different portraits of life at wartime Bletchley Park
August 2014
Shopgirls: The True Story of Life Behind the Counter review – 'rich in surprising insights'
Lucy Lethbridge enjoys a revealing, if uneven, history of how retail transformed women's working lives
April 2014
The Disinherited review – a fascinating history of the illegitimate children of an aristocratic family
The prosaic and melancholy truth behind a peer's affair with a Spanish dancer grips Lucy Lethbridge
January 2014
The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House by Ben Highmore – review
This trawl through the living rooms and kitchens of the past century is an amusing piece of nostalgia, but it's short on social analysis, writes Lucy Lethbridge
November 2013
Priscilla: the Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France by Nicholas Shakespeare – review
Top 10s
The top 10 books about servants
May 2013
The Devonshires by Roy Hattersley – review
A pacy study of the Devonshire dynasty and its steely determination to survive says nothing new, but makes a rollicking read nonetheless, writes Lucy Lethbridge
January 2013
Shooting Victoria by Paul Thomas Murphy – review
An account of the eight assassination attempts on Queen Victoria shines light on the wider world of 19th-century Britain, writes Lucy Lethbridge
November 2012
Consider the Fork: A History of Invention in the Kitchen by Bee Wilson – review
An absorbing look at the implements we use to prepare food is also a story of human ingenuity, writes Lucy Lethbridge
October 2012
Serving Victoria by Kate Hubbard – review
Queen Victoria's court was a place of stifling tedium, rife with petty jealousies, writes Lucy Lethbridge
May 2011
Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in War and Peace 1939-1949, by Virginia Nicholson — review
Virginia Nicholson uses astonishing first-hand accounts to examine women's lives in wartime Britain– lives, for many, injected with a vivid new intensity, writes Lucy Lethbridge
October 2008
This Matron was no battleaxe
Review: Florence Nightingale by Mark Bostridge
Neither heroine nor harridan, Florence Nightingale emerges from this biography as fully rounded yet remarkable, says Lucy Lethbridge